Does correct
pronunciation
even exist?

Is correct pronunciation a myth?
For that matter, does language exist?

Wait! What did he say!? Is he mad??
Of course language exists!!

Well, yes and no. It can be argued that what we call language is merely the dialect of a region which came to dominate a country. What we call “French” is merely the modern evolution of the dialect of the region around Paris where the seat of power, wealth and prestige was located at the time the country began to form.

If you lived in Marseille or Bordeaux, the native tongue would have been quite different than “French”, and as a part of what would become France, ie. the monarchy centered in Paris, you would have to deal with a world where the official language of the state was foreign to your own.

Moreover, if you were middle class or wealthy, and wanted your children to have the best opportunities to advance in the world, it would require that your children learn to speak “Parisian”, or what we today call French.

This pattern can be seen all over the world. In the case of Spanish, we still call it Castilian to this day, as it was the language of the royal court of Castile in Madrid. This goes for English as well. It could fairly be argued that what we call standard English is really what had been “Londonese” (although in the case of English, this is complicated by both the Viking invasions and the conquering of England by the French speaking Normans. This is also true of Mandarin Chinese, and many other “languages” around the world.

There are some example of this in the inverse as well. Regional differences in the German and Italian languages are more pronounced in Europe than they are in either French or Spanish or English.

This is due to there having been a far lesser degree of centralized organization and control, where one region dominates politically and culturally. In both modern day Germany and Italy, there were rival principalities vying for political dominance all through the middle ages right up to the middle of the 19th century.

This is the opposite of what we saw in France for example, where there was a single monarch ruling over the entire national territory for almost the entirety of the last 1,000 years, with some exceptions, of course.

So, think about this a bit. Is what we call French really just a Parisian dialect which came to dominate a country?

I am oversimplifying a great deal here, but I am pointing it out in the hope that you might find it as interesting to consider as I do.