Regulatory bodies and authoritative dictionaries for English
Some languages have a "regulatory body" issuing recommendations and guidelines regarding the use of that language.
For example in the case of Spanish it's the Real Academia Española whose status is recognised in all Spanish-speaking countries. The Academy, among other things, publishes a dictionary ("DRAE"), in print and online, which is usually given a lot of prestige (but is not without controversies, of course).
Are there any such authorative—or at least influential—institution(s) or publication(s) for the English language?
Solution 1:
Fortunately or unfortunately, no. There is no regulatory body like the Real Academia Española (or the Académie française, or the many others) deciding what is correct English; English evolves naturally with the changing usage of people. Right and wrong are decided based on describing and analyzing actual usage. (This — "descriptive linguistics" — is so canonical among English linguists that I've seen some of them occasionally find other languages' regulatory bodies an absurd idea. Anyway…)
Among dictionaries, the Oxford English dictionary and the Merriam-Webster dictionary are a couple of the "good" dictionaries (there are others), but note that these, too, have as their goal being reliable indicators of actual usage, and not regulation of, or authority over, language.
Solution 2:
In the minds of most people, dictionaries and usage guides are a cipher to some presumed existing canonical, regulated definition of what is correct in the English language. Of course, no such canonical definition exists—grammaticality of English is governed only by the bulk of actual usage.
Most publishers of English dictionaries long ago abandoned any idea that they might set forth what is and is not correct in English—those few that actually did ever hold such a belief were few and far between. Modern English dictionaries, for the most part, are descriptive, although most do offer some degree of usage advice and notes. Merriam-Webster tend to be more descriptive than most, countenancing many usages criticized by others. The American Heritage Dictionary has its “Usage Panel” of experts on language and the usage notes in the dictionary cite percentages of the Usage Panel who approve or disapprove of questionable usages. The Oxford English Dictionary is widely revered as the canonical collection of English words, and it is certainly an amazing work of scholarly endeavor, most interesting in its coverage of historical English. But of course the OED holds no more official status than any other dictionary.
The most regulation we have today are style guides—such as the Chicago Manual of Style, the Associated Press Stylebook, and The MLA Style Manual. These are of course binding only on the writing governed by the producers of those style guides, but they are also used by many writers who are not required to follow them.
Then there are the professional peevologists, authors of such works as the Dictionary of Disagreeable English and The Big Book of Beastly Mispronunciations, who berate various usages and pronunciations they don’t like, citing whatever evidence supports their preferred usage or pronunciation, and ignoring the evidence that doesn’t.
Last, and certainly least, there is Strunk and White's The Elements of Style, perhaps the most overrated book on usage ever written, riddled with errors, hypocrisy, vacuous advice, and fatuous platitudes.