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I think French has prescriptive dictionaries (to varying degrees of success)



They have Académie Française which intends to control the language to an extent, in recent times focussing a lot on resisting then encroachment of English word and phrases, but IIRC their recommendations don't carry as much weight as many think and are often ignored even by government departments and other official French bodies.

The Académie do publish a dictionary every few decades though, there was a new edition recently, so there is a prescriptive dictionary for French even though it carries little weight in reality.

French is the only living language to attempt it to this extent, though the existence of one is enough to make my “there are none for living languages” point incorrect. It is difficult to pin a language down until no one really speaks it day-to-day (so it doesn't evolve at the rates commonly used languages do).



Very few of those have official force or cover much more than a subset of language properties (i.e. spelling rules), but definitely more than the "none" of my original assertion.


"prescriptive" does not mean "have legal force" though...




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