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
For
example, English is a pluricentric
language, with numerous differences in
pronunciation, spelling, etc. between the United Kingdom
and the United States
, and a variety of accents of those and other
English-speaking countries. It is usually considered a
symmetric case of a pluricentric language, because no variety
clearly dominates culturally. Statistically, however,
American English speakers constitute more
than 66% of native English speakers, with
British English in second place at 18% and
other varieties having up to 5% 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,
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 American English
is accelerating, sometimes outstripping British English in
popularity among student and business users. Other varieties of
English, including
Australian,
Canadian,
Indian,
Hiberno
English,
Newfoundland,
New Zealand, and
South African English, are far less
known as distinct varieties in terms of the teaching of English as
a second language abroad.
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.
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 and
Switzerland, which differ in
pronunciation,
vocabulary, and sometimes even
grammar.
Sometimes this even applies to news broadcast 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.
Portuguese
Portuguese varies mainly between
Brazilian Portuguese and
European Portuguese. Both dialects 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 dialects without previous exposure
can be occasionally difficult, especially for a Brazilian
attempting to understand a European.
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
due to come into force over the next years; 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
judgment, though, may be attributed to the fact that a large
proportion of the Spanish citizens with whom a Portuguese speaker
may have been in contact were Galicians. As further anecdotal
evidence, a rural Galician accent is sometimes mistaken in Madrid
for a Portuguese accent.
Catalan-Valencian-Balearic
One example of a situation that does not arise of the fact that
languages and national identities of its native speakers do not
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 succeed—beyond the title of an
excellent
dictionary
and the name given by
Ethnologue—Catalan
is generally the colloquial name accepted by the philological
community to refer to the whole system. 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.
Spanish
Spanish is not completely
pluricentric because all the
Hispanophone world has the same common
orthographic rules for the written language. There are differences
in pronunciation, like
ceceo or
seseo, and hundreds of slightly different regional
pronunciations. All varieties are perfectly intelligible in their
acrolects (standard or accepted local
forms), except for minor vocabulary differences. The
mesolects and
basilects
(non-standard local usage such as
Chicano in
relation to
Mexican Spanish for
example) have diverged more, with different slangs, foreign
influences and choices in verbal forms.
However, the worldwide
diffusion of telenovelas and
Spanish-language music favor intercomprehension and have led to an
unusually high degree of linguistic conformity in areas like New York City
where large numbers of Hispanics are in close contact. This
process is known as linguistic
levelling.
Because of this (and because it has traditionally formed relatively
few
creoles) out of all the modern
Romance languages Spanish is the
least divergent in its local forms and the standard local varieties
are universally understood by all speakers wherever the language is
spoken.
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 societies
before the advent of simplified characters, remain in use
elsewhere, including the Republic of China
on Taiwan
, Hong Kong
, Macau
, and many
overseas Chinese
communities.
Spoken Chinese
Standard Mandarin is the official Chinese spoken language in China,
Taiwan and Singapore, whilst Standard
Cantonese is de facto official in
Hong
Kong and Macau.
There are a few differences in the spoken
Standard Mandarin 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 archaic pronunciation.
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, cligner
in standard French). Ring (
rocade or
périphérique in standard French) is a common word in the
three national languages for
beltway or ring
road.
Hindi and Hindi-influenced languages
Hindi, sometimes called Hindustani, is spoken in India
.
In
addition to the spread of standard Khariboli Hindi by a burgeoning Indian diaspora,
Hindi, derived from Sanskrit, has generated
multiple other languages often considered to be the product of
distinct civilizations or cultures. These include (via
culture)
Bihari,
Maithili and other
Indo-European languages descended
from Sanskrit, and languages created by political movements, such
as
Urdu (the imposition of Arabic-derived
script onto traditional Hindi to Islamicize indigenous Indian/Hindu
culture and language during the Islamic invasion of Hindu India).
As a result, ironically, Urdu is often considered one of the many
descendant languages of Hindustani Khariboli or Sanskrit. Urdu
speakers can thus understand Hindi, and this explains the
subsistence of Urdu speaking cultures and peoples on Hindustani
culture, entertainment, and other language-influenced
sectors.
Others
- Arabic has a standard acrolect, with several mutually unintelligible basilects.
- Danish: Once identical with
Danish Rigsmaal, a number of spelling reforms have brought the
Norwegian Riksmål closer to spoken
Dano-Norwegian.
- Dutch: despite
sometimes significant differences in vocabulary, pronunciation, and
grammar between the Dutch
, Flemish, Surinam
, and the Netherlands Antilles
variants, there is just one Standard Dutch
orthography as regulated by the Dutch Language Union.
- Korean: North and South (to some
extent—differences are growing; see Korean language
North-South differences)
- Modern Hebrew is grammatically and
lexically uniformal, 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 pronunciation, Sephardic pronanciation, Temani pronunciation (which is considered the closest
to the original pronunciation of Hebrew in biblical time), and
others. Hebrew is therefore probably the only pluricentric language
where differences in pronunciation do not depend on the speaker's
place of birth, but on his or her cultural background.
- Serbo-Croatian: Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian standard forms that are sometimes
considered either two or three separate languages. Perhaps the
biggest difference is in orthography, with the Serbian variety
being written in the Cyrillic
alphabet.
- Bulgarian and Macedonian standard forms which properly
form a dialect continuum and share
a set of grammatical features which set them apart from other
Slavic languages, with the Bulgarian standard being based on the
more eastern dialects, and the Macedonian standard being based on
the more western dialects.
- Romansh, with five written
standards (from southwest to northeast: Sursilvan, Sutsilvan,
Surmiran, Puter, Vallader) as well as a "compromise" written
standard, Rumantsch
Grischun.
- Swedish: Two varieties with
official status exist: "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 /e/, /i/, /y/, /ä/ and /ö/ as [ç] (as in
German "ich"), this sound is usually pronounced by a Swedo-Finn as
the /ch/ sound in English "cheese"; 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'.
- Persian:
three standardised varieties with official status in Iran
, Afghanistan
(officially named Dari) and Tajikistan
(officially named Tajik).
See also
References
- 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.).
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