votethelanguage.com
An Apparatus of the American Language Academy
BALLOT XXIV · OPEN Enroll About
Standard American 250 · Goes to Public Ballot

OTE THE LANGUAGE

The contested points of the American language go to public ballot. The Academy ratifies the result into the published standard — July 4, 2026.

Cast Your Ballot → Enroll as Citizen Become an Elector
Ballot No. XXIV · Voting open through 31 May MMXXVI · 1,247,803 ballots cast to date
NOW ON THE BALLOT
A binary point of contention — the second-person plural address.
Variant A
y'all
62%
vs
Variant B
you all
38%
Cast Vote →
128,402 votes cast · closes 31 May
The Mechanism

How a word enters the standard.

Every contested point passes through a four-tier curation pipeline. The public ballot is the substantive entry surface; the Academy ratifies the published result.

I★

Enroll & Cast

Citizens enroll free; Electors enroll at the credentialed tier. Each ballot is one mark of record on each contested point — binary, production-test, or register-classification.

CITIZEN · ELECTOR
II★

Curation Pipeline

Results cascade through four tiers — Electors, Founding Citizens, Garner-or-Rickford editorial, and McWhorter as Editor-in-Chief — before reaching the publishable column.

FOUR TIERS · ONE RECORD
III★

Ratify & Publish

The Academy publishes Standard American 250 on the Republic's two-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary. The ratified entries enter the standard permanently.

JULY 4, MMXXVI
Two Tiers of Participation

Enroll. Mark a record. Stand for the language.

Citizen — Free

The Citizen

No subscription.
  • Cast a ballot on every contested point in the active session
  • Submit candidate words to the citizen-submission cascade
  • Receive the monthly dispatch from the editorial board
  • Demographic record contributes to the apparatus's published cross-tabs
Enroll as Citizen → Open enrollment · all fifty states
Elector — $60 / year

The Elector

$60 / year
  • All Citizen rights — and a credentialed weight in the curation pipeline
  • Access to Tier I editorial review on contested-point shortlists
  • Standing record in the Electors' roster of the Republic
  • Quarterly print broadside · corpus access · member's seal
Become an Elector → ★ Five hundred and thirty-eight per state · cap enforced
Now on the Ballot · Session XXIV

Contested points in active session.

Three card types: binary contests, production-test entries, and register-classification calls. The session closes 31 May MMXXVI.

Binary · Pronominalcloses 31 May
y'all
/
you all
Second-person plural address. The descriptive question: which form enters Standard American 250 as the unmarked register?
128,402Cast →
Binary · Past Participlecloses 31 May
gotten
/
got
The American-British divergence. Has the participial split held in contemporary American corpus evidence?
94,118Cast →
Register · Black Americancloses 31 May
habitual be
·
parallel admit
Whether the habitual be construction enters the published standard as a parallel register per Article II.
211,887Cast →
Production Testcloses 14 June
enshittification
Admit to the dictionary as a noun marking the progressive degradation of a private platform's usefulness?
62,304Cast →
Binary · Spellingcloses 31 May
grey
/
gray
Standard orthography. Corpus evidence has shifted in the last decade — does the published standard follow it?
38,991Cast →
Register · Classificationcloses 21 June
finna
Classify finna as: (a) Black American parallel register; (b) regional Standard American; (c) colloquial only.
87,540Cast →
View All Contested Points →
The Architecture

The apparatus, and the institutions it serves.

votethelanguage.com is owned by Apus and operated as the public participation gateway. The institutional surfaces live separately, by design.

— The Foundation —

The American Language Academy.

The institutional descriptive academy that publishes Standard American 250 on July 4, MMXXVI. The editorial board ratifies the published standard; the Foundation maintains the corpus, the dictionary, and the journal.

americanlanguageacademy.org↗ The Declaration on the American Language↗ The Corpus & Reference Works↗
— The Campaign —

AL250 — the 250-year retrospective.

AL250, Inc. holds the campaign anchor for the cultural moment. The site you are on is the apparatus both institutions use — the public surface where attention converts to participation in the substantive ballot.

al250.com↗ Submit a candidate word→ About the apparatus→
A Civic Ballot on the American Tongue

Vote the Language.

The standard is set every 250 years. The next mark of record is yours. Enroll, cast, stand for the language.

Enroll Now →
Sealed · Standard American 250 · MMXXVI