Muhr, Rudolf / Norrby, Catrin / Kretzenbacher, Heinz L. / Amorós Negre, Carla (eds.), Non-Dominant Varieties of Pluricentric Languages: Getting the Picture. In memory of Michael Clyne. Frankfurt/M.: Peter Lang 2012 (original) (raw)
Related papers
Pluricentric languages: retrospect and prospect
Elsevier Encyclopedia of Linguistics, 3rd ed., 2024
The concept of pluricentricity is a facet of the language-dialect dichotomy and is inherently intertwined with the perspectives of "language making" (Krämer et al. 2022), i.e. the social construction of linguistic varieties. Definitions of pluricentricity tend to focus on the official status and codification of national varieties, while Clyne (1992) and Muhr (2012) provide an extensive list of criteria to assess the pluricentric status of a given variety. Inherent to the distinction between dominant vs. non-dominant varieties are considerations involving "pluricentric linguistic justice" (Oakes 2021) and a realization of power dynamics in linguistic schools as such.
(Non-)dominant varieties of a (non-)pluricentric language? Italian in Italy and Switzerland
Non-dominant varieties of pluricentric languages. Getting the picture, 2012
This chapter is an initial foray into the question of Italian as a possible pluricentric language. In contrast to the other large languages of western Europe. Italian is strikingly absent from the existing literature on pluricentricity-presumably because Italian is overwhelmingly spoken only in one country: Italy. However, in this preliminary study Italian is seen to show some signs of pluricentricity-best described as diffuse or weak, both within and beyond Italy's national borders.
Routledge FOCUS short monographs, 2019
Chapter 1, Table of Content, frontmatter and index of the upcoming monograph in Routledge's FOCUS series (May 2019) The present book argues that linguistic concepts need to be applicable across various languages and philologies in order to be meaningful and to stand the test of time. If we are to make lasting progress, we need to have clarity with regards to basic terms, concepts and notions. Every bi- or multilingual student of more than one philology will have noticed a certain dissonance of a given language's concepts with another one. It is here argued that linguists should accept such differences only when there are compelling reasons for them to be moulded into terms and therefore into our conceptualizations of language. Recent years have seen the use of a concept called "pluri-areality" in German dialectology. "Pluri-areality" and "pluri-areal" are my renderings from the original German "pluriareale Sprache" (Wolf 1994: 74, Scheuringer 1996). "Pluri-areality" directly contradicts the established concept of pluricentricity in its fundamental assumptions of how national varieties are to be modelled. The two approaches will be discussed at length and contrasted before the backdrop of the Germanic languages that are at the centre of this book, with a focus on English and German as the two languages that mark the difference in approach most clearly.
Nothwithstanding various controversies which accompany the global presence of English, its emergence into a planetary language is a ociolinguistic reality. Another reality is that its local manifestations are not necessarily of identical ´breed´: the many Englishes engendered by the ever-growing number of their users who are enclosed within their sociopolitical and geographical environment, albeit connected to the globalized world, call for an examination of the applicability of the proposed global models vis-à-vis localized English sociolinguistic profiles. The paper discusses the pluriparadigmatic character of the global presence of English and analyzes data acquired mostly in a local Slovakia´s linguistic landscape. The paper also calls for a more critical approach to English(es) as they are used locally, and invites to adopt a more inclusive attitude which enables their users to see English not only as a crucial resource in their linguistic repertoires but also as an important marker of their ´glocal´ identities.
Debunking "pluri-areality": on the pluricentric perspective of national varieties
Journal of Linguistic Geography, 2020
Pluricentric approaches to international varieties have been a mainstay in English dialectology since the 1980s, often implied rather than expressed. What is standard lore in many philologies is today seriously questioned in one philology. This paper assesses the pros and cons of the so-called "pluri-areal" perspective, which has in the past few years become increasingly prominent in German dialectology.
R. Muhr, J. Thomas (eds), "Pluricentric Theory beyond Dominance and Non-dominance", 2020
Italian has the status of an official language in quadrilingual Switzerland. In spite of its minority position, it is used in administrative and political contexts on a federal level and official documents are systematically translated into it. Due to this fact, the Swiss variety of Italian can be considered as a partially autonomous standard of Italian, at least at a rudimentary stage (Ammon 1989). This paper focuses on a list of lexical and morphosyntactic items which have been identified as typical features of Swiss Italian and tracks their presence in ‘model texts’ (Ammon 2017). These texts can influence language use by reinforcing the status of regional forms through usage in controlled contexts. The survey takes into account two major authorities (the press and daily news on TV) as well as non-professional literary texts. How do standardisation processes occur? Which trends of implicit standardisation can be observed?