Now I know

Somewhere along the way in my teaching career the Spanish institute decided that the letters ch and ll were no longer their own separate letters. I always informed my students of this, but still taught them as letters since they are still in all the dictionaries that way. When they would ask me who made such a decision I was unable to answer. There is no one who makes such decisions about the English language. However, it turns out that there actually IS a governing body of the Spanish language. And here it is, right in the heart of Madrid. Wow. Spanish has such an institute, French has one too. I want to say there is one for Italian also. How interesting is that? They want to preserve their language so much that they have an institute to make decisions about it!