Pluricentricity and Pluriareality : Dialects, Variation, and Standards

This edited collection engages with the contentious debate surrounding standard varieties and their distribution. For the past three decades, these arguments have coalesced around two camps: pluricentricity (the idea that standard varieties are intimately associated with nation states, with more powerful national standard varieties affecting the less powerful), and pluriareality (the idea that standard varieties are not limited by national borders and, instead, overlap significantly across dialect boundaries). With chapters focused on English, German, and Dutch, this book offers fresh perspectives on these theoretical constructs, drawing on data from a variety of standards, and a range of methodological approaches to their analysis. Researchers at all levels interested in standard language variation will find these discussions valuable, especially due to the volume’s integrative approach to pluricentricity and pluriareality, which seeks to demonstrate that these models heavily overlap rather than being in strict opposition.