Volume 35, Issue 1

Against the background of a concise overview of Ulrich Ammon’s oeuvre this article first of all provides a constructive-critical account of some of the key concepts and questions that guided his macrosociolinguistic work on pluricentric languages and variation in German. In what follows, an attempt is made to further develop some of Ammon’s thoughts through emphasising the elasticity of the concept of pluricentricity and arguing for a creative use of the concept of “roofing” when describing the intricate interplay of standard and nonstandard varieties especially in language contact zones.

This article argues that the notion of pluricentricity fails to capture the multitude of sociolinguistic contexts in which a language may have two or more standards, which is due to the fact that it was invented with a particular context in mind (that of emerging nation-states). The notion also suffers from a reliance on an undefined and unclear (perhaps metaphorical) notion of a centre (and a periphery). A more neutral term such as multi-standard language therefore appears more useful. It is also argued that pluriareality is not a notion that can fruitfully replace pluricentricity, as the two presuppose different approaches to standardisation: one usage-based, the other normative. This is demonstrated with reference to the on-going discussion of the Austrian variety of German.

Drawing on the example of the French-speaking world, this article makes the case for the valuable contribution of a systematic ethics-based approach to understanding linguistic pluricentricity. Following a critical review of three key definitional dimensions of the concept - political, linguistic and representational/attitudinal - it argues for the inclusion of a fourth ethical dimension to assess whether there are moral arguments which might also favour the recognition of distinct national standards. It builds on the recent linguistic justice literature in the fields of political theory and political philosophy to propose the notion of “pluricentric linguistic justice” as a framework for evaluating the ethics of local norm-setting and enforcement in pluricentric contexts. To demonstrate how pluricentric linguistic justice might be assessed, it examines a series of valued-based arguments discussed in the linguistic justice literature relating to the instrumental and identity functions of language, considering how they might apply to specific contexts in the French-speaking world. Besides contributing to existing theory, the notion of pluricentric linguistic justice has the potential to help advance social equality, by drawing attention to some of the social and political injustices associated with diatopic variation in spatially diffused languages more generally.

Common definitions of pluricentricity rely on the notions of centre , nation , and norm , frequently without, however, offering sufficient detail on what precisely these mean. These terms are often applied to classify languages as pluricentric or not, without adequately recognising intra-linguistic variation and dynamics of power within a speaker community (language ownership). Using the example of a national minority language from North-West Germany, North Frisian, this article discusses how a narrow reading of the definition of pluricentricity would deny such a status to this language, when in fact the sociolinguistic situation of North Frisian matches that of many acknowledged pluricentric languages. Instead, the article suggests that the term nation should no longer be equated with state , that the term centre be further specified to determine what institution or which individuals have authority over language, and that the term norm be more clearly articulated to account for the variability in “correct” language use.

In Cabo Verde, Portuguese is the official language, while Kriolu is the first language of virtually all the population. The schooling context clearly reflects this diglossic situation: while the vast majority of children speak Kriolu at home, Portuguese continues to be the exclusive language of instruction. Thus, Portuguese in Cabo Verde represents a post-colonial language that has maintained its de jure status but has not entered de facto domains of use. The research described in this article is based on discourse analysis of legislative and policy documents and extended semi-structured interviews with politicians, educators and language activists. Our results in this former colonial context invite us to reconsider traditional understandings of pluricentricity, as they suggest that Cabo Verdean Portuguese is not (yet) associated with local identity and has not (yet) been accepted by its speakers as a legitimate, standardised variety.

The study presented in this article looks at the effects of the changes in national language policies following the break-up of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia on teaching the Serbo-Croatian language or a “language which is simultaneously one and more than one” as a foreign language. The study explores how language ideologies and conflicting attitudes towards national standard languages, recorded both within nation-states and across nation-state borders, are understood by teachers in the context of teaching Serbo-Croatian as a foreign language. The article also examines the extent to which these understandings reflect current discussions of pluricentric languages and methods adopted for teaching pluricentric languages as foreign languages.

Globalisation and late-modernity have brought profound socio-political, economic, cultural as well as linguistic transformations. An intensification of mobility and transnational migration around the globe has added a complexity to linguistic interactions and repertoires that can be better analysed with non-essentialist approaches. With this in mind, the aim of this article is to expand the research agenda on pluricentricity beyond the standard language paradigm, which is based on the western conceptualisation of languages as clearly definable and discrete entities. In this respect, we address pluricentricity from the speaker’s perspective as opposed to the traditional perspective focused on standard-setting centres and peripheries. In this article, we adopt a communicative-based perspective on pluricentricity and focus on the potential accommodation behaviour of Spanish speakers from Argentina and Spain in mobility contexts. We conducted 39 semi-structured interviews to access perceptions and attitudes regarding the possible negotiations of short-term convergent norms and the creation of a spontaneous translanguaging space. We assume that awareness of one’s own repertoire as well as tolerance towards the perceived markers of the respective interlocutors’ repertoire are necessary conditions for successful pluricentric communication.

While research on pluricentricity has traditionally focused on phonological, lexical and grammatical variation across national varieties, pluricentric languages also provide a rich laboratory for the exploration of pragmatic variation, and potentially new insights into the complexities of both pragmatics and pluricentricity. Pluricentric pragmatics remains a developing field and determining appropriate methodologies and strategies for data collection remains open to evaluation and assessment. Methodological considerations pertaining to address research in pluricentric languages are made from a range of perspectives, which are typically interconnected and will depend on the intended research focus. In this contribution we present a critical reflection on methodological aspects of pragmatic research, based on our own experiences investigating address in several pluricentric languages (in particular German and English). After a brief overview of the pluricentric languages considered and their address systems we provide an outline of the research projects reviewed. We then discuss in detail issues regarding data types and data collection (in particular questionnaires, interviews, focus groups and various online data) and consider further methodological aspects such as the choice of research framework, context and type of address investigated, quantitative and/or qualitative approaches taken and whether the research focus is on actual use, reported use and/or perceptions. We conclude with some suggestions for further research directions.

The recent pragmatic turn in the study of pluricentric varieties marks a shift in analytical focus, with increasingly more research contrasting the conventions of language use and interaction across pluricentric varieties. This turn demands new data types and new methods of analysis which uphold the principles of contrastivity and comparability. Addressing this basic requirement for the case of cross-varietal speech act analyses, the present article examines the contextual factors to be considered in the choice of data types and the potential definition and usability of a pragmatic variable in speech act analyses across data types. These considerations are applied to a cross-varietal analysis of responses to thanks in direction-giving exchanges across English in Canada, England and Ireland. The study highlights the frequent necessity of a multi-faceted definition of the pragmatic variable. In addition, challenges of contextual equivalence which emerge in the course of the analysis highlight a basic need for research to regularly re-examine the linguistic context and the definition of the pragmatic variable and to potentially redefine the variable during the analytical process. The contrastive analysis reveals a more extensive use of routinised responses to thanks in the Canadian English data relative to the Irish English and English English data. A more complex closing, with more continuations and confirmation checks, is shown to characterise the Irish English data, a finding which is suggested to potentially relate to a strong orientation towards hospitality in the Irish context.

This article takes a cognitive, interactional perspective on pluricentricity and examines the use of fragmental constructions in a mid-sized dataset, drawing on recordings of British English and American English post-match interviews (PMIs), i.e. media interviews conducted with football players after matches in the British and North American top leagues. It examines what types of fragmental constructions are deployed in the PMIs and whether the use and distribution of such constructions vary between the British and American “communities of practice” (Lave/Wenger 1991). The study finds that the quantity and quality of fragments largely differ, with the British English data showing a higher relative frequency of fragmental constructions, more grammatical variation, and a use of fragmental constructions which do not necessarily draw on latent grammatical structures from the prior speech for meaning-making. It has been suggested by Biber et al. (1999) that clausal elliptical structures are generally less typical of American English. The present genre-specific analysis suggests an interdependence between fragmental constructions and their routinisation and frozenness, interactional constraints, as well as deviant sports and media cultures shared by these communities of practice, which can be treated as a form of “enregisterment” (Agha 2007).

The social action of thanking is an everyday practice in most cultures and, as such, it has been the focus of contrastive studies of different languages, cultures, and countries. This article focuses on the sequential organisation of the action of thanking in Swedish, which is a pluricentric L1 in Sweden and Finland. The study’s data are actions of thanking realised through the Swedish interjection tack [‘thank you’] in service encounters in the two countries. By analysing the sequential position of actions that are similar in form, their potentially different interactional functions can be examined. The actions of thanking are described in two different sequential positions in relation to adjacency pairs, as either responsive or initiating thanking actions. After an initiating thanking action a response is conditionally relevant or expected. A contrastive analysis of these responses reveals that in 73 % of the cases they constitute another action of thanking with the word tack . In Finland, the proportion amounts to 81 % and in Sweden it amounts to 65 %. This contrasts with my earlier study on thanking in medical encounters in the two varieties (Grahn 2019), where a slightly higher proportion of thanking actions as responses to initiating thanks was reported in Sweden than in Finland. In sum, sequential position is highlighted as critical for the management of interpersonal relations and the organisation of this institutional setting.