We’re just getting to the oldest linguistic debate. Is a linguist’s job to describe, or to prescribe? I lean very heavily towards describe.

That’s literally how accents and dialects work. People in a bubble developed different linguistic shifts. To them, and to to broader world as a whole, they are speaking a correct form of English, and yet some thick accents are practically unintelligible to people who haven’t practiced hearing the accent. We only recently began worrying about being understood beyond our narrow in groups. For the majority of history, these “bubbles” are just what we called cultures.

There are those constraints around written/spoken word, for sure. I’m more referring to how close it is to the “raw” thought.

We evolved the ability to think. In order to allow our thoughts to reach others, we developed spoken word. In order to allow those spoken words to be passed through time, we developed written word. Each refers back to the previous “layer” of communication.

Even someone who has a speech impediment, for instance, is still using the same written language as someone else in the same culture. And that written language was developed specifically to try and evoke the words someone in the culture speaks.

Words aren’t “endangered”. There are literally an infinite number of potential words, if we need to reinvent a meaning, we can quite easily(see: synonym). Further, the original meanings still exist. You can still use “awful” to mean “inspiring awe” and you’re correct, you just won’t be understood.

Gotteeeeeem!

That evolution has happened SO many times. Why does “literally” give you fits when “awful” or “terrific” do not? Perhaps because it’s the shift you happen to be living through?

And “6 7” is a shibboleth, a linguistic phenomenon that’s been going on for as long as we have written history, essentially, it’s just now that it’s the youngins doing the thing, it’s bad. Yeah, you right, pretty shitty take.

Written word is a facsimile of a facsimile of what we’re actually communicating. We go from nebulous thoughts, concepts not bound by language, to sounds that roughly convey those concepts, and then to squiggly lines that roughly convey those sounds, and then back up the chain in the other person. Really, it’s a miracle we understand each other at all.