Even for French, in practice, that’s not how it works... The académie is often criticized for being too rigid and not following the language that’s actually spoken.

I love the description of English as "three different languages dressed in a trenchcoat pretending to be a proper language" :)

I'm trying to learn German at the moment, and it's fascinating seeing the similarities between the languages, and the things we used to have in common but got dropped or modified in English.

You're wrong about french, it's pretty different between France and Canada. I first learnt France french, then Canadian. happen to find "correct" french extremely boring, absolutely no reason to speak in a boring way if you can speak cool french ;)

> Unlike e.g. French, there is no definitive, latest version of the language decreed from above.

What do you mean by this? French is spoken differently with different dialects over the world - eg. Quebecois French is not the same as France French. And while French may be one of the roots of English, there are also French words with their roots in English. It's all a mishmash.

I am referring to formalized standards here. There is exactly no literature that I care about which has been written in some English variant other than British or American. Why force students and professionals to buy special dictionaries and conform to oddball rules, which really only have a small number of differences, just because it tickles the fancy of a minority of would-be authorities. For example, Canada should just adopt American English. As for the countries mentioned in the article, the majority of "English speakers" there are not competent as speakers (easily seen by spending a few minutes reading Twitter), so the people proposing formalizing variants for those regions are not doing so in good faith, but to satisfy a political agenda that is only tangentially related to interest in language.