It would stay regular if there was a strict governing body for it that wasn't a Webster-style "whatever people are speaking is the new definition of correct".

English really is a disaster of a language. There was a(nother) great XKCD about it just a few days ago. https://xkcd.com/2907/

Correction it's a disaster of at least 4 languages and this is probably why English is so hard to dethrone as it have no strict ownership so everyone is kind of equal in speaking it incorrectly.

Sometimes lack of rigidity is actually an feature that allows for things to sort of work that would be politically impossible if thinks had to be specified formally before being used.

I'm pretty sure the reason English is hard to dethrone is because Britain ~helped~ forced the various colonies to join world commerce using English, so they started teaching it to entire generations as the national second-language, and then because the USA dominated world commerce after that in a sort of "we'll let you in on the game if you speak our language and use our money" sort of way.

> if there was a strict governing body for it that wasn't a Webster-style "whatever people are speaking is the new definition of correct".

There is no way it can work.

People don't care about governing bodies when they speak a language.

They kind of do. In my language there exists a central "governing" body that decides what is correct, and some "incorrect" regionalisms are disappearing because of it.

When that happens, it’s likely more about politics and social status than the governing body.

Ie, the governing body decrees that the regionalisms from the dominant region is the definitive version of the language. It might then be considered cool to speak that way even without a governing body.

Are you referring to french? Because, if anything, french in France has an insane quantity of slangs and has an extremely emergent vocabulary. Much more so than any English speaking country I can think of. Quebec isn't really influenced by the Académie française yet has a much more "correct" usage of the language generally speaking.

Maybe it's a totally different language but still it goes to show that even a very prestigious central authority doesn't make a language better or less prone to diverge. Regardless of the reason, French is evolving much more quickly than English.

But maybe that's beside the point. If someone wants to "learn French" they can learn by the official rules and communicate with other french-speaking people regardless of how many slang variants exist in France. They can also probably watch French television and understand it.

The point of esperonto was to make it easier to learn. French is regular, but extremely complicated. English is complicated and has a million special cases. Both languages are hard enough to master that society starts to judge a person's intelligence by how well they know the rules and special cases.

> if it ever gained popularity it wouldn't stay regular

This. Utility and purity always pull in opposite directions.

I see those boutique little (programming) languages written by amateur language designers with exotic type systems or “everything is an X” philosophies, and my reaction is to assume that they are useless for anything past toys and experiments.

I know useful language features have been born in that world and then eventually bolted onto mutt languages like Java and Python, but that suits me just fine.