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Enigmatism415
More specifically, this distinction offers an appreciable benefit in using phonetic input methods–regardless of one's own pronunciation habits–because it cuts down the character-candidate list considerably. The fact that many speakers still make the N/L distinction (I personally know a few) only further bolsters the cause.
On the other hand, people who don't make the distinction would have to memorize which words have which initial. I've met a lot of people who don't use pinyin input when writing Mandarin because they don't make the s/sh distinction in their dialect and are thus frustrated trying to write pinyin and constantly guessing wrong on shi/si and similar.
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That's one hell of a slippery slope to push. I'm sure Mandarin crusaders are employing this very ideology at the expense of other languages.
Mandarin is a completely different language. At any rate, I'm against using words like "correct" and "incorrect" when talking about language used by native speakers. There are mistakes, of course, which are when a speaker says something that differs from how she would normally say it, but the normal speech of a native speaker can never be incorrect.
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There is currently a rampant misuse of the English language amongst speakers of all dialects, and some of these mistakes are slowly becoming dominant over the correct forms, but they are no less mistakes (e.g. the conflation of 'there' and 'their', 'it's' and 'its', etc.).
First of all, that's written language, not spoken. Second, the confusion between "their" and "they're" is far, far, far from being dominant. Third, they are mistakes because they differ from how the writer usually writes.
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There is a clear distinction in my mind between that which is 'correct' and that which is 'popular'; the former is defined by language authorities whilst the latter is defined by the level of public support.
I'm sure there is, but this position is not held by very many linguists. The position is not helped by the fact that so-called "authorities" often forbid the use of constructions that have been in common use amongst the most celebrated authors all the way back to Shakespeare (and sometimes even Chaucer). These authorities spout made-up rules about "which" and "that", about splitting infinities, about singular "they" and plural "data" and other ridiculous rules consistently broken by writers from Shakespeare to Hemingway. The only point of these rules seems to be to allow people to look down on everyone else as using their native language "incorrectly".