> ...Yankees and their 'hick' accents.

Heh -- a fun little thing about moving to England is that loads of people use the work "reckon" here in everyday conversation; whereas in the US that would stereotypically be part of a "hick" accent.

> The way I understand it, linguistic standardization is a modern and artificial process.

It may be partially artificial, but I don't see how it could be considered "modern". I'm no linguistics or history expert, but it seems to me there has always been two things in tension: forces which push for unification, and forces which push for diversification.

For unification: On the one hand, there's obviously an advantage to having a common language everyone speaks. 2000 years ago in the Mediterranean it was Greek; 1000 years ago in Europe it was Latin, 800 years ago in the ME / North Africa it was Arabic, etc.

Also, there are advantages to having larger groups of people working together; one way of getting people to work together is to have a shared identity; one way to have a shared identity is to have a shared language. And so one way to grow your power is to unify larger areas (either via annexation or conquest) and then get the areas to have a similar language (either by education / persuasion or suppression). And the most natural way for the powers that be to "unify" a language is to declare the one spoken in the capital city as the official standard.

For the diversification side: It's very natural for language to evolve; and the larger number of people speak a language, the more difficult it is for everything to evolve in the same direction. This means that local areas or local groups are naturally going to "drift".

And once they do drift, then identity comes into play in the opposite ways. It's beneficial for leaders of a large area if everyone has the same identity; but there's an opposite attraction for individuals to identify as part of a smaller, distinct group; and thus to emphasize or even push for the diversification of the local dialect.

> In this light, you could say that there's essentially no such thing as the 'right' accent.

One thing I have noticed is that "prestige dialects", as they're sometimes called, have had people go through the language and "revise" it to make it more "rational". After studying Mandarin for several years, I started studying Cantonese; and it's pretty clear that Mandarin has had a lot more effort from people put into it to revise it and make it consistent, whereas Cantonese is much more spoken, and thus a lot more "quirky" in lots of ways.

The "no double negative" rule in English is an example of this sort of thing. Many languages have "agreement", where the whole sentence is either negative or positive; "Je n'ai jamais" in French could literally be translated "I not have never"; but in French it's not a double negative, it's just "agreement". English used to be exactly the same way (you can read educated people speaking unabashedly with double negatives in, say, the court of Henry VIII); but at some point some clever people decided that it would be much more rational if two negatives made a positive. That became the "prestige dialect", and the "common" people who spoke English the way their ancestors had for hundreds of years were then looked down on for being uneducated and speaking English "incorrectly".

So yes, you can't say Mandarin or the Chicago Manual of Style's version of English is "right"; but it's quite probable that they are more consistent than the alternatives (though perhaps less florid or interesting as a result).