Does the English language have an official Academy? [duplicate]

For some languages, there are academies that decide topics such as grammar and spelling of things, for example, for the Spanish language, there are 22 academies in 22 different countries, all making decisions on spanish grammar in their country. I would like to know if there is something that serves the same purpose for the English language.

In American English (at least), it's basically a controlled anarchy. The language is governed by a combination of consensus and reputation, and no one person or group can change the rules by fiat. Any change requires some critical mass of other English speakers to agree with and adopt it before it will be considered proper English.

With that said, though, there are a number of dictionaries (like the Oxford English Dictionary), style guides (like the New York Times style guide), etc that many people consider at least semi-authoritative. They tend to be highly influential as far as business and formal English go, to the point where professors, editors, etc will often consider your speech/writing "incorrect" if it didn't adhere to a certain style guide's rules or had words pronounced/spelled in ways that aren't listed in a certain dictionary. The more such books mention a particular rule, the more people will be inclined to accept it, and the less educated you will typically appear to be if you seem unaware of it.

Native speakers of English (who take an interest in the language) tend to start getting the giggles when anyone proposes that the language needs to be controlled. I can't speak about the US, but in the UK the latest pronouncements of the Académie française form the basis of regular stock funny stories for newspapers when the news is a bit thin - for example here

As another answer says, to the extent that there is any authority at all, it comes from widely accepted dictionaries and style guides. For British English books like H W Fowler's Modern English Usage and Sir Ernest Gower's Plain Words: A Guide to the Use of English have been very influential. Significant disputes over what is "correct" grammar have always been a feature of the English language - for example see the Wikipedia article on English grammar disputes - that article also discusses the lack of any central authority to rule on such issues.

Many people see the lack of any authoritative source of "correct" English as a highly positive feature of English, enabling it to rapidly adapt to changes in culture, technology and social attitudes.

To answer your question very clearly, no, there is absolutely no authority in English that is called an academy.

There are however guides, manuals, institutions, authors, dictionaries, and publications that do their best to inform people on usage.

The way they go about it determines what grammar they use. Most do not bother being overly descriptive because it is too expensive and takes up too much room. Hence, they appeal to the indicative mode or say that such is such and such a way. Others that consider some or other usage obligatory are defined as prescriptivists and view English grammar normatively, meaning that according to them some specific variation of English must be used in some particular way and never in any other way. There are many, many such proponents, and they nearly as often conflict with one another. Corpus linguistics (the large bodies of words on the internet that are used to determine contemporary and regional usage via science) will show you clearly that there is no one authority of English and that there are often many alternatives to any given grammar taught by a traditional or pedagogical grammarian.

Hence, in contemporary linguistics, the consensus is usually that there is no one correct way to say or write something but that there are standard ways of doing such or conventional ways of doing such. There are still further divisions that are attributed to register (style of context) and region (vernacular or dialect) and therefore in said settings what may be viewed common in one, could be viewed as idiosyncratic in another (in English there are only two conventions, that of Great Britain and that of the US and Canada).