Putting aside the technicalities (it is not language that is prescriptive or descriptive, but linguistics), that’s a widespread position among perfectly literate people, including professional linguists. Nothing to do with the number of “likes”.
Spanish from Spain has an official dictionary that dictates what is correct and isn’t. You can’t be more prescriptive than that. Sure, that dictionary adds words based on usage, even ones that are clear misspellings of the “real” word, but they are marked as so.
The RAE is not a prescriptive institution at all. They fight people on social media over that. They’re not shaming anyone for spelling a word different, just describing what the language users are doing.
Student: “language is prescriptive not descriptive”
Teacher: “you fail 3rd grade spelling”
And I absolutely support keeping people back who believe English should be guided and evolved through “Likes”.
Putting aside the technicalities (it is not language that is prescriptive or descriptive, but linguistics), that’s a widespread position among perfectly literate people, including professional linguists. Nothing to do with the number of “likes”.
different languages and institutions have different viewpoints. Turkish and French are more prescriptive, english and spanish more descriptive*
* except when it comes to those gay alternate pronouns, like ew, we can’t reflect the documentation of a language for a few Fa-[slur]s.
Spanish from Spain has an official dictionary that dictates what is correct and isn’t. You can’t be more prescriptive than that. Sure, that dictionary adds words based on usage, even ones that are clear misspellings of the “real” word, but they are marked as so.
The RAE is not a prescriptive institution at all. They fight people on social media over that. They’re not shaming anyone for spelling a word different, just describing what the language users are doing.