alt Hacker NewsUsing Spanish as an example:
People learn a deterministic way to sound a word at school, same for everyone. The very fact of having that as part of education tends to stabilise the language to a degree: I can read 16 century poems and stuff sounds the same and rhymes perfectly.
Most local variations and accents will deviate in semi standard ways: For example, southern spaniards will usually use the same sound for S and C (which in Spain's Spanish is the famous 'lispy s' sound). So in general people are aware of what is part of the standard and what is a local characteristic.
Our educative system makes a point of those variations explicitly not being 'wrong', but sometimes in practice there are ideological debates about this stuff: For example, people might self police in media by adapting to the standard, which in turn draws criticism for "reneging of their identity").
Replies
>(which in Spain's Spanish is the famous 'lispy s' sound)
No. In Spanish Spain it's
za, ce, ci, zo, zu with /th/ as in think.
There are also variants accepted for local dialects, for example "small car" can be
Argentina: "autito"
Colombia: "autico"
Spain: "autillo" but last time I posted it, anthk said it's more complicated https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44490096
They sound quite different, and all are accepted and understood, but it's very unusual to use the "wrong" one. Only if you are a tourist or immigrant or something.
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For the GP: the idea is that a few variants/dialects are accepted. When the pronunciation changes, it slowly is introduced in the written text as a literally recourse, and then it the new spelling may get popular in some area, and then accepted as a regional variant. If the new variant gets everywhere it becomes the official one. So the spelling slowly changes to accommodate the changes in the local or global variants and the old spelling get's deprecated.
So the spelling is keep somewhat in sync with the oral version.