Then you have a different understanding on what "works" means.
In many languages, standardisation means that the language actually survives because without it loses its utility and will replaced by a dominant language.
Not an expert in that matter, I only try to replicate what I've heard.
Basque did standardise quite late. To my understanding, people had difficulty to understand one another when they came from another valley. That limited the utility and Castilian (aka Spanish) was often used which put pressure on the language. And what words do you learn then at school? And what do teachers learn? And what is used at the university?
And all the media, in which form will it be?
Romansh didn't standardise (or better said the standardisation didn't took hold) and faces that difficulty.
I bet you'll find a similar story in Irish Gaelic.
Yes, for smaller languages standardisation kinda sorta works. And yet you'll undoubtedly find that in reality the actual Basque and Irish Gaelic that are used differ from the prescribed standard.
> It never really worked in those instances. What you see in the books and what you hear in real life are often two quite different things.
You are basing your assumption on languages using Roman writing system which actually isn't capable of expressing all sounds used within the language. All language systems doesn't suffer this. For example most Indian languages have accurate sound to letter mapping even to the level of defining short and long sounds of same alphabet differently. In order to speak correctly you just have to say the individual sounds together. There is no weirdness involved.
> You are basing your assumption on languages using Roman writing system which actually isn't capable of expressing all sounds used within the language.
Romanian and Turkish disagree. And the spoken language still differs (probably less so in Romanian, more so in Turkish).
In my experience letters A-Z doesn't capture the whole gamut of utterances used in the language. Most languages use more sounds than 26 letters can capture. I don't know about Turkish or Romanian so can't say. As an example my mother tongue Hindi and Sanskrit maps the most of utterances of hard, soft, and nasal varieties originating from throat, palate, cerebral, dental, and lips into specific symbols. This reduces the friction between writing and speaking.
One can still speak wrong if they learn to speak the letters wrong but chances are reduced. Are Romanian and Turkish similar?
> In my experience letters A-Z doesn't capture the whole gamut of utterances used in the language. Most languages use more sounds than 26 letters can capture.
It's more than just sounds. Turkish and Romanian alphabets capture the sounds of Turkish and Romanian alphabets quite well.
But then...
In Turkish "I will do something" is written like this: "Bir şey yapıcaǧım". And if you're going for proper enunciation, that's what you will say. In most situations most people will say "Bi şey yapıcam" (note the omission of "r" in "Bir" and "ǧı" in "yapıcaǧım").
Do the letters correspond to the sounds? Yes. Does it help? Nope, people will not speak the way it's written, because written rules describe a very specific rigid set of rules. And, for example, elisions and contractions [1] are very common in nearly every language and are often frowned upon in written texts (except for a small number of unavoidable ones).
And that's before we go into the plethora of sounds between dialects and regional variations. For example, in Swedish, there's a combination of letters, `sj`[3] that has at least four different pronunciations across Sweden. So, the word "seven", "sju" will be pronounced with [ɕ] in one part of Sweden, with [ɧ], in a different part of Sweden and so on. It's the same word, should it be spelled differently for each group of people?
And note, we're just touching just 1% of 1% of the complexities of pronunciation :) And they rarely if ever can be captured in written text and rules for the written text.
It worked in literally every country. Every German knows standardized German, every Italian knows standardized Italian, every Chinese knows standardized Mandarin, every Malaysian knows standardized Malay, etc.
Every British person is taught Received Pronunciation etc.
And yet, you still have dialects, you still have people using words and grammar in slightly and not so slightly different ways from the prescribed standard.
And yet everyone speaks in their own dialects, pronunciation, many places have their own twists on grammar etc (RP is an accent, so grammar isn't relevant when discussing RP). Let me quote myself from my original answer:
--- start quote ---
"Standardising a language" never works. Prescriptivism rarely does because languages are living things and evolve no matter how many rules you throw at them.
--- end quote ---
So, Britain has standardised English. Did it work? Well, not really, almost everyone keeps speaking in their own way. As for government speeches... Here's SNP's Ian Blackford in the House of Commons (not government, but still, a high-ranking politician) [1]. And I believe Americans, Australians and New Zealanders have no problem understanding their politicians despite English not being standardised.
As for TV. Have you ever watched British TV outside BBC News programs (which traditionally, but not necessarily use a "BBC accent" which also changes with time)? Just a few samples: Big Narstie Show [2], Eastenders [3], and, yes, BBC News (around 10:02 mark, 16:30) [4] Or even something like this [5], but this is an extreme example.
All that despite English having been standardised for more than a century.
But that's spoken language. We're talking about written language standardization here.
edit: And arguably even spoken language eventually gets standardized through the written word. There's tons of regional German dialects without High-German, a more or less randomly chosen dialect, people from different regions would have a hard time even talking to each other.
> Reforming the written language, however, is quite a possibility, and is often a good thing, because it actually follows a language's evolution rather than pretending that rigid rules reflect reality.
It never really worked in those instances. What you see in the books and what you hear in real life are often two quite different things.
Even things like grammar rarely survive real life.