English, unlike many major languages, does not have a major regulatory body in the vein of the Academie francaise. This means that while spelling and grammar are held to generally looser rules, this also means that English evolves more rapidly as seen in its absorption of loan words.
So what PoD or circumstances would lead to English being regulated with an academic body?
An old soc.history.what-if post of mine (with minor changes):
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The thread on Dr. Johnson and spelling reform reminded me that there were innumerable proposals in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries for an English Academy to be modeled after the Academie Francaise, to ensure the regularity of English usage as well as spelling.
There is an interesting discussion in Harrison Ross Steeves, *Learned Societies and English Literary Scholarship in Great Britain and the United States* (1913):
"One of the obvious results of the transference of the machinery of French pseudo-classicism to England in the seventeenth century is found in reiterated proposals, from many of the leading English men of letters of the day, for the founding of an English academy of letters which should have the same weight of critical authority as the French Academy. Projects for such an academy were offered by Sprat, Dryden, Defoe, Addison, and Swift, and more casual recommendations were made by James Howell, Milton, the Earl of Roscommon, Pope, and Prior;9 but these were without exception ineffective, although the idea was urged at intervals until the middle of the eighteenth century, when it was laid at rest, probably largely through the opposition of Dr. Johnson. In the absence of a special foundation for the improvement of the language, however, the Royal Society undertook, four years after its establishment in 1660, at least to acknowledge the want of an English academy by the appointment of a "Committee for Improving the English Tongue."10 No record is extant of definite results attained by this committee, although it is certain that they held some formal meetings...
"That the existence and relative effectiveness of the French Academy failed to bring about the establishment of such an institution in England, especially in an age so strongly under the dominance of French critical ideas, seems matter for real wonder. The reasons which Matthew Arnold suggests for the existence of the French Academy and the absence of a similar body in England--briefly, that the characteristic of the English mind is individual energy, of the French, openness and intellectual flexibility12--account probably for the readiness of the English to dispense with a check upon intellectual freedom. But these reasons are not properly historical reasons; they explain a condition, rather than trace the origins of an historical fact. It is probably correct to say, in a general way, that the greater intellectual democracy of the English could not submit to such a tyranny of trained taste; but a more real reason for the failure of the academy idea in England is probably to be found in the intellectual conditions which determined the particular nature of scholarly comity throughout this century, and which gave birth to the Royal Society itself.
"The Royal Society is as truly a coefficient of English intellectual interests in this period as the Academie Francaise is for France. Although at the first glance these two societies may seem to voice the same scholarly aims, no intellectual incentives could be more radically divergent than those which gave life to the two. The Academy owed its existence, under a nearly absolute political tyranny, to a demand for authority in matters of taste; the Royal Society responded to the growing outcry against everything savoring of scholastic authority, and stood as the expressed champion of the experimental philosophy of Bacon..."
http://books.google.com/books?id=SrUkAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA40
Anyway, can anyone see a plausible way that one of the countless proposals for an English Academy could actually have succeeded, and if so what its effects would have been? It probably has to be before Dr. Johnson, during the seventeenth or early eighteenth centuries, when the French cultural influence was greatest; by the nineteenth century, even Matthew Arnold, who had praised the effects of the Academie Francaise on French prose, and suggested that in some respects English literature suffered from the lack of such an Academy, ridiculed the idea that he was proposing an English Academy:
"Every one who knows the characteristics of our national life, and the tendencies so fully discussed in the following pages, knows exactly what an English Academy would be like. One can see the happy family in one's mind's eye as distinctly as if it was already constituted. Lord Stanhope, the Bishop of Oxford, Mr. Gladstone, the Dean of Westminster, Mr. Froude, Mr. Henry Reeve,--everything which is influential, accomplished, and distinguished; and then, some fine morning, a dissatisfaction of the public mind with this brilliant and select coterie, a flight of Corinthian leading articles, and an irruption of Mr. G. A. Sala. [1] Clearly, this is not what will do us good. The very same faults,--the want of sensitiveness of intellectual conscience, the disbelief in right reason, the dislike of authority,--which have hindered our having an Academy and have worked injuriously in our literature, would also hinder us from making our Academy, if we established it, one which would really correct them. And culture, which shows us truly the faults, shows us this also just as truly."
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/4212/4212-8.txt
[1] On Sala, see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Augustus_Henry_Sala: "His literary style, highly coloured, bombastic, egotistic, and full of turgid periphrases, gradually became associated by the public with their conception of the Daily Telegraph; and though the butt of the more scholarly literary world, his articles were invariably full of interesting matter and helped to make the reputation of the paper..."
https://groups.google.com/d/msg/soc.history.what-if/yWZFy4LRzxc/PAIHpWJqQ8oJ