Pluricentric language

A pluricentric language is a language with several standard versions, both in spoken and in written forms. This situation usually arises when language and the national identity of its native speakers do not, or did not, coincide.

Examples

English

English is a pluricentric language, with numerous differences in pronunciation, vocabulary, spelling, etc. between the United Kingdom, North America, South Africa and Australia. There is also dialectal variety within these areas, as well as among other English-speaking countries. It is usually considered a symmetric case of a pluricentric language, because there is no clear cultural dominance of one variety over others.^{[citation needed]}

Statistically, however, American English speakers constitute more than 66% of native English speakers, with British English in second place at 18% and other varieties such as Australian English and Canadian English having up to 7% each. Due to globalisation in recent decades, English is becoming increasingly decentralised, with daily use and state-wide study of the language in schools growing at a rapid rate in most regions of the world.

British English was formerly dominant in the education systems of most regions where English was taught as a second language. In former colonies where English is not the first language of the majority of the population, such as Malaysia, India, Pakistan, and Singapore, British English remains strong, and is also the primary form taught in the European Union and the rest of Europe. In some regions of the world, the use of General American is accelerating, sometimes outpacing British English in popularity among student and business users.

Other varieties of English, including Australian, New Zealand, and Canadian English, are taught to those wishing to reside in or do business with those particular countries but are far less common in the instruction of general English classes internationally.

Some, such as the case of the different Philippine varieties, are even stigmatized. As a recent development, Filipinos try to "polish" their accent to make it resemble an American accent more closely. This change was brought about by the recent bloom of the out-sourcing (mainly in forms of service call centers) in the country.

The pluricentrity of English is not a recent phenomenon. There is ample evidence that before the Acts of Union 1707, Scots was considered to be a language of its own, representing a separate standard language within a wider Anglic family of languages.

Catalan-Valencian-Balearic

This is an example of a situation that arises from the fact that languages and the national identities of their native speakers do not always coincide. Valencian is the name used for the same language that is called Catalan in Andorra, the Balearic Islands and Catalonia, among other places. Valencian is the official name of the language in the Valencian Community and has its own writing rules dictated by the Acadèmia Valenciana de la Llengua, created in 1998. This institution recognises that Catalan and Valencian are different local forms of the same language—mutually intelligible to all speakers—with no single accepted common name. The University of the Balearic Islands is in charge of the rules of the different Balearic forms, that have not had a traditional common local name (Majorcan in Majorca, Minorcan in Minorca). However, given that the syncretic and academic name Catalan-Valencian-Balearic has not succeeded—beyond the title of an excellent dictionary and the name given by Ethnologue—Catalan is generally the colloquial name accepted by linguists to refer to the whole system. It is an asymmetric case of a pluricentric language, due to the current pre-eminence of the Central Catalan dialect and the (sometimes questioned) origin of the language in the southern communities during the Reconquista.

Chinese

Writing system

Chinese, at least in terms of its writing system, has been pluricentric since the mid-20th century, when simplified Chinese characters were introduced in the People's Republic of China. Simplified characters are now official in the PRC and Singapore, while traditional Chinese characters, the system originally used in Chinese-speaking societies before the advent of simplified characters, remain in use elsewhere, including Hong Kong, Macau, the Republic of China (Taiwan) and many overseas Chinese communities.

Spoken Chinese

Mandarin is the official Chinese language of China, Taiwan and Singapore, while Cantonese is de facto official in Hong Kong and Macau and one of traditional language in Singapore and Malaysia. Hokkien is sometimes used with official language function in Taiwan and also one of traditional language in Singapore and Malaysia. There are a few differences in the spoken standard promulgated in the PRC and the ROC (Taiwan). Some of the vocabulary is different and a few words are officially pronounced with different tones. See Taiwanese Mandarin for more details on the differences. This site also lists the differences in the pronunciation standards.

French

The three main standards of the French language are Parisian (Standard) French, Standard Canadian French (Québécois), and a more neutral International French (used in media and in teaching). The last typically represents a French marked by much greater use of archaic vocabulary no longer current in metropolitan France. Official Québécois also makes a conscious effort not to borrow foreign vocabulary (creating such words as "stationnement" for "parking", the English word used in French from France), making it prone to continued divergence from European. At the same time, live Québécois has more English borrowings than accepted by the Académie Française as "proper" French. There is also a variety of French, Acadian, which is distinct from Quebec French and is spoken mainly in the Maritime provinces, especially New Brunswick. Acadian is marked by differences in pronunciation, intonation, and vocabulary. Both Acadian and Québécois feature pronunciation considered archaic in other varieties.

Minor standards can also be found in Belgium and Switzerland, with a particular influence of Germanic languages on grammar and vocabulary, sometimes through the influence of local dialects. In Belgium for example, various Germanic influences in the spoken French are evident in Walloon (for example, to blink in English, German and Dutch, blinquer in Walloon and local French, clignoter in standard French). Ring (rocade or périphérique in standard French) is a common word in the three national languages for beltway or ring road.

German

By contrast, Standard German is often considered an asymmetric case of a pluricentric language, because the standard used in Germany is often considered dominant, mostly because of the sheer number of its speakers and their frequent lack of awareness of the Austrian German and Swiss Standard German varieties. While there is a uniform stage pronunciation based on a manual by Theodor Siebs which is used in theatres, and, nowadays to a lesser extent, in radio and television news all across German-speaking countries, this is not true for the standards applied at public occasions in Austria, South Tyrol and Switzerland, which differ in pronunciation, vocabulary, and sometimes even grammar. Sometimes this even applies to news broadcasts in Bavaria, a German state with a strong separate cultural identity. The varieties of Standard German used in those regions are to some degree influenced by the respective dialects (but by no means identical with them), by specific cultural traditions (e.g. in culinary vocabulary, which differs markedly across the German-speaking area of Europe), and by different terminology employed in law and administration. A list of Austrian terms for certain food items has even been incorporated into EU law, even though it is clearly incomplete.^{[citation needed]}

Hindi, Urdu and Hindi-influenced languages

Hindi is a large dialect continuum defined as a unit culturally. In addition to the national lingua franca Hindi-Urdu, sometimes called Hindustani, which is based on a Persianized register of the Khariboli dialect and has two modern standard forms, Standard Hindi and Standard Urdu, there are historical literary standards such as Braj Bhasha (closely related) and Awadhi (not so close), as well as more recently established standard languages based on what were once considered Hindi dialects, Maithili and Dogri. Other varieties, such as Rajasthani, are often considered distinct languages but have no standard form.

Portuguese

Portuguese varies mainly between Brazilian Portuguese and European Portuguese. Both varieties have undergone significant and divergent developments in phonology and the grammar of their pronominal systems. Brazilian Portuguese is considerably more conservative in its phonology, but much less conservative in its grammar. The result is that communication between the two varieties of the language without previous exposure can be occasionally difficult, especially for a Brazilian attempting to understand a European. Because of the extensive and long-term influence of the Brazilian telenovelas, a Portuguese national has little problem in understanding the Brazilian accent and specific words.

Brazilian and European Portuguese currently have two distinct, albeit similar, spelling standards. A unified orthography for the two varieties (including a limited number of words with dual spelling) has been recently approved by the national legislatures of Brazil and Portugal and is now official; see Spelling reforms of Portuguese for additional details. Formal written standards remain grammatically close to each other, despite some minor syntactic differences.

African Portuguese is based on the European dialect, but has undergone its own phonetic and grammatical developments, sometimes reminiscent of spoken Brazilian.

Galician

Galician is a special case. Originally the same language, it has lost almost all contact with Portuguese since the 14th century. Nowadays, a Galician standard has emerged which is still very close to European Portuguese. In pronunciation, however, each branch has gone very different ways, and as a result communication may be difficult at first. To a Galician speaker, Portuguese sounds like a kind of Galician with most vowels left out, whereas to a Portuguese speaker Galician may sometimes sound like Portuguese with a Spanish accent. The latter because most speakers of Galician in the cities have learned it as a second language after Spanish.

Others

• Bulgarian has two literary norms (knizhovni normi): Bulgarian and Banat Bulgarian^{[citation needed]}.
• Dutch and Afrikaans, though related are considered separate languages.
• Komi, a Uralic language spoken in northeastern European Russia, has official standards for both its Komi-Zyrian and Komi-Permyak dialects.
• Korean: North and South (to some extent — differences are growing; see North–South differences in the Korean language)
• Malay (in Malaysia) and Indonesian are used to be two variants of the same language (Malay). Both languages are nowadays generally considered separate languages due to the growing divergence between the two and some political reasons. Nevertheless, they still retain some degree of mutual intelligibility despite a number of differences in vocabulary and grammar (See: Differences between Malaysian and Indonesian). The Malay language itself has many local varieties and dialects, whereas the Indonesian language, acting as lingua franca of the nation, has received a great number of both international and local influences.
• Modern Hebrew is grammatically and lexically uniform, but Israelis from different cultural backgrounds have different ways of pronunciation, all of which are considered standard and correct by language authorities. Among the different ways of pronunciation are: Ashkenazi, Sephardic, Mizrahi, and Temani (which is considered the closest to the original pronunciation of Hebrew in biblical times). Hebrew is therefore probably the only pluricentric language where differences in pronunciation do not depend on the speaker's place of birth but on their cultural background.
• Norwegian consists of a multitude of spoken dialects, which are written with two different orthographies: Bokmål "book language" and Nynorsk "New Norwegian".
• Romance languages
  • Romanian in Romania and that in Moldova
  • Romansh, with five written standards (from southwest to northeast: Sursilvan, Sutsilvan, Surmiran, Puter, Vallader) as well as a "compromise" form.
  • Spanish, which has both national and regional linguistic norms, though all varieties are mutually intelligible (outside of minor vocabulary differences) and the same orthographic rules are shared throughout; the related Ladino is considered a separate language.
• Persian: Three standardised varieties with official status in Iran, Afghanistan (officially named Dari) and Tajikistan (officially named Tajik). Iranian Persian and Afghan Persian equally utilize the Perso-Arabic script in writing. Tajik Persian as used in Tajikistan utilizes a modified form of the Cyrillic alphabet, although attempts at re-introducing Perso-Arabic script are being made.
• The standard languages of several South Slavic languages represent points along a dialect continuum. Macedonian is a separate mono-standard language in the middle point between Bulgarian and Serbo-Croatian. The latter is a group of mutually intelligible languages with the biggest differences being orthographic: Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian standard forms that are sometimes considered either two or three separate languages.
• Ukrainian and Rusyn are eithered considered to be two standards of the same language or two languages.
• Swedish: Two varieties exist, though only one written standard remains (regulated by the Swedish Academy of Sweden): Rikssvenska, the official language of Sweden, and Finlandssvenska which, alongside Finnish, is the other official language of Finland. There are differences in vocabulary and grammar, with the Finnish variety remaining a little more conservative. The most marked differences, however, are in pronunciation and intonation: whereas Swedish speakers usually pronounce /k/ before front vowels as [ɕ], this sound is usually pronounced by a Swedo-Finn as [t͡ʃ]; in addition, the two tones which are characteristic of Swedish (and Norwegian) are absent from most Finnish dialects of Swedish which have an intonation reminiscent of Finnish and thus sound more monotonous when compared to Rikssvenska.

See also

• Binary distribution
• Diasystem
• Standard language
• Dialect continuum
• Ausbausprache - Abstandsprache - Dachsprache
• World language

Bibliography

• Clyne, Michael G. (Ed.). (1992). Pluricentric languages: Differing norms in different nations. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. ISBN 3-11-012855-1.
• Clyne, Michael G.; & Kipp, Sandra. (1999). Pluricentric languages in an immigrant context: Spanish, Arabic and Chinese. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. ISBN 3-11-016577-5.
• Dua, Hans R. (1992). "Hindi-Urdu as a pluricentric language". In M. G. Clyne (Ed.).
• Thompson, R.W. (1992), "Spanish as a pluricentric language", in Clyne, Michael G., Pluricentric Languages: Differing Norms in Different Nations, pp. 45–70, ISBN 9783110128550, http://books.google.com/?id=wawGFWNuHiwC&pg=PA45&lpg=PA45&dq=spanish+pluricentric#v=onepage&q=spanish%20pluricentric&f=false 

External links

• Language Attitudes and language conceptions in non-dominating varieties of pluricentric languages (by Rudolf Muhr)