Do central language regulation bodies accelerate or inhibit orthography changes?

Question

In some discussions about the latest reform of the German orthography, it was claimed that a central language regulation body prevents people from writing as they like and thus prevents “natural” changes of orthography.

In contrast to this, I would hypothesise the following:
The establishment of spelling as a concept amongst the users of a given language automatically leads to the existence of conservative users who oppose spelling changes. The amount of these users and their “stubbornness” finally become so high that it prevents changes of spelling from reaching broad acceptance, unless accepted and propagated by a central regulation body for the language. This particularly applies for changes of a more general nature that affect more than just a small number of words, e.g., a hypothetical replacement of c by k, whenever it is pronounced as /k/ (as in can), for the English language.

Two examples that stimulated my hypothesis:

• There is no central regulating body for the English language. As a result of this, there is some variety in spelling, e.g., the differences between British and American English or certain punctuation issues. However, the apart from this (and even within this), little to nothing has changed since the end of the 19th century (if I am not mistaken). Having read some of the works by H.P. Lovecraft, who is known for his archaic language, the only »old« spellings that caught my eye, were uses of the trema (e.g., in coöperate) and a few archaic vocables (e.g., Esquimaux).
• For the German language, the Orthographische Konferenz (Orthographical Conference) of 1901 established an official orthography and at the same time reformed some aspects of spelling, for which a widespread convention existed at that time, e.g. the usage of the letter c. Though the next orthography reform (which most prominently changed the usage of the letter ß) happened not until 1996, the spelling of many words changed during this time, e.g., many alternative spellings allowed in 1901 came out of use (e.g, Concern), modern spellings were established (e.g., Photo → Foto) and even one rule changed (the triple-letter rule, which became increasingly bizarre) – all this being done by the Duden dictionary, which had an official monopoly on defining correct spelling. While both reforms met heavy opposition, their changes became accepted very quickly (in about 10 years) by most users.

Finally, my question: Is there more to my hypothesis (given a certain establishment of orthography, central regulating bodies accelerate orthography changes) than the above two examples?

Answer 1

What really fixes spelling is printing. Before Caxton set up shop in England, spelling was a matter of representing one's speech as closely as one could, using whatever spelling conventions one liked, and understanding others' different conventions as well. Since everything was copied, there was understood to be a great deal of variance. As there is today in handwriting, but not spelling.

Official language regulation bodies have, at best, a spotty history. They don't really represent the way the language is developing, and while the French Academy may have hindered whatever development there was towards a phonemic French orthography (I don't know of any, but what do I know?), it is certain that the French are too fond of their orthography, which is serviceable and meets their requirements adequately, to change much, unless something new, like texting or autotranslate or speech recognition, makes it seem like a good idea in some contexts.

As for English, forget it. There's too much installed base. Think MicroSoft after 400 years of .doc files. Are they going to revert to ASCII? No chance.

Answer 2

The French Academy does go through orthographic reforms - the last one was done in 1990. It's certainly not as radical as German reforms but is quite present such as aiguë -> aigüe.

Answer 3

In general language standardisation happens after changes in the language communities. Only reforms in Chinese is a counter-example. The impetus of changes derives of the cultural changes in the communities. Historical American English and Brazilian Portugues changed faster. One language with many more or less isolated communities (historic Greek), isolated Portuguese in Portugal and Brasil. Small Dutch/Flanders may have easier reforms.

Regulation like revisions, and cross-community standardisation, are conservative (though still receive much opposition). Take the reform of German where some occurrences of ß (but not all) were replaced by ss.

Regulation authorities are seldom speeding things up to a larger degree. In general they start to allow new orthography and finally make some new spelling the standard. They also cannot really hinder new cultural terms.

The dictionary though intending to be non-regulative, in fact is regulative. As people tend to follow spelling and word choice as provided in the dictionaries.

Conclusion: The mosquito steering the elephant. Though language regulation is linguistically important, its controlling function (negative or positive) depends on other factors, like the Chinese in the past wanting to do a huge simplification.