The Pluricentricity Debate

This book unpacks ongoing debates on pluricentricity, an idea implicit to the study of World Englishes which considers differing standards or local norms in a language's national varieties, with a focus on the emergent counter-perspective of "pluri-areality" as exemplified in the German language.

Stefan Dollinger is Associate Professor at UBC Vancouver, specializing in historical linguistics, sociolinguistics and linguistic border studies. He is the author of New-Dialect Formation in Canada (2008) and The Written Questionnaire in Social Dialectology (2015), and Chief Editor of the Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles - www.dchp.ca/dchp2 (2017).

Table of Contents List of tables List of illustrations Preface Acknowledgements Terminological Note 1 The problem 1.1 What is pluricentricity? 1.2 What is pluri-areality? 1.3 Pluricentricity in the world 1.4 Pluricentricity in the Germanic languages 1.5 An outline of the book 2 Standardizing German: concepts and background 2.1 Contiguous borders vs. sea borders 2.2 What's in a name? 2.3 The standardization of written German 2.4 Abstand, ausbau language and "roofing" 3 The international pluricentric model 3.1 English 3.2 Northern Germanic 3.3 Belgian Dutch (Flemish) and Dutch Dutch 3.4 Luxembourgish 4 The German "pluri-areal" model 4.1 Dialectological context 4.2 Pluricentric and monocentric models of German 4.3 The Upper Austrian - Bavarian border 4.4 A pluricentrist turned pluri-arealist 5 The case against pluricentricity 5.1 Pluricentricity and the Österreichisches Wörterbuch (ÖWB) 5.2 The charge of ideology vs. enregistering ideology 5.3 The pluri-arealist bias 5.4 Reinterpreting Auer (2005) 5.5 Pluricentricity: outdated in a borderless Europe vs. homo nationalis? 6 The case against "pluri-areality" 6.1 Demystifying pluri-areality = "geographical variation" 6.2 A-theoretical empiricism 6.3 The Axiom of Categoricity 6.4 Type vs. tokens and social salience 6.5 Formulae in a black box 7 The lynchpin: speaker attitudes 7.1 State Nation Austria vs. Nation State Germany 7.2 Linguistic insecurity 7.3 German mother-tongue language instruction 7.4 Language planning and pedagogy 8 Examples: trends, not categoricity 8.1 An undetected Austrianism: Anpatzen 'make disreputable' 8.2 An unlikely Austrianism: der Tormann 'goal tender' 8.3 An even unlikelier Austrianism: hudeln 8.4 An enregistered Austrianism: es geht sich (nicht) aus 8.5 A typology of Austrianisms 9 Safeguards in the Modelling of Standard Varieties 9.1 The Uniformitarian Principle: "vertical" and "horizontal" 9.2 Explicit and falsifiable theories 9.3 "The speaker is always right": pedagogical implications 9.4 The language political angle of "pluri-areality" 9.5 Considering political borders 10 Bibliography General Index