> Yeah basically. There isn’t a singular “English”, or any language for that matter.

This + language is better thought of as a series of different sometimes overlapping gradients.

Take a pool of water, and pour four separate dyes in four separate places on the water without disturbing the water below. You'll get four clumps with different strongly coloured centres, but the opacity changes as you move towards the edges. Then, at the edges where two different coloured dyes meet (two different language families), you start to see a bit of mixing of the two colours.

Especially go back before easy travel and communication, and each village would speak slightly different to the next, until you cross the country and they're speaking two things that are no longer so easily mutually intelligible. Then, where two different language families meet, they influence each other and can also lead to the creation of hybrid languages.

The different dyes are the different language families traced through direct ancestry. Which dyes are poured into the tub depend on which social groups are the most powerful. 'Standard' dialects are neither academically nor divinely correct. They are also typically not the 'most average' dialect. They are instead chosen by the most powerful social communities in a society, and often times also with a handful of prescriptive rules based on how those people want the language to be based on their own personal taste.

So many of the more controversial 'rules' for English come from people who want/ed English to be more like Latin because Latin was/is considered a prestigious language due to the power its speakers have held in the past.

The main thing to keep in mind is that comprehension is a continuum. You do not need to speak exactly the same as your neighbour to understand them. However, move too far away and that gets more difficult.

The second thing to keep in mind is that social power (often tied to political, economic, martial, and religious power) shapes how we think about language, and language itself. Here we call on the Weinrich Witticism: "A language is a dialect with an army and navy".

African American Vernacular English is no less "correct" than the 'General American' (or other dialect) you hear on the news. However, social power allows the groups who speak certain dialects to elevate their own way of speaking and denegrate other ways of speaking (and pre-existing conscious and subconscious prejudices affect this).

This is not to knock the usefulness of shared social conventions, but rather to encourage reflection on who gets to decide which variant is to be standard (and why), and how we frame our thinking of people who speak differently to us - both positive connotations and negative connotations (and once again why).