Article Debunking “pluri-areality”: On the pluricentric perspective of national varieties Stefan Dollinger Department of English Language and Literatures, The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada Abstract 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 questioned in one philology, however. This paper assesses the pros and cons of the so-called “pluri-areal” perspective, which has in the past few years become prominent in German dialectology. Intended to replace the pluricentric model, “pluri-arealist” perspectives affect the modelling of German standard varieties in Austria and Switzerland, among others. Attempting to falsify claims on both sides, this paper argues from an English-German comparative perspective that the idiosyncratic treatment of national varieties in one context is a problem that threatens the unity of the field regarding how the standard is seen in relation to other varieties. It is shown that the base of the “pluri-areal” paradigm is an a-theoretical perspective of geographical variation that adheres implicitly to a ONE STANDARD GERMAN AXIOM. This meta-theoretical paper suggests three principles to prevent such terminologically-fuelled confusion henceforth. Keywords: Language variation and change; national varieties; standardization; codification; theoretical modelling of variation; language and identity; German; English; Austria; Canada (Received 27 September 2018; accepted 18 February 2019) In fact, all communities larger than primordial villages and face-to-face contact (and perhaps even these) are imagined. Communities are to be dis- tinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined. (Benedict Anderson, 2006: 6) 1. Introduction The present paper examines the notion of “pluri-areality,” a term used in German dialectology, in comparison to the dominant approach for the modelling of standard varieties, the pluricentric model. It is a concise presentation of the fuller argument in Dollinger (2019c). In English linguistics, pluricentricity is profoundly implicit and most obviously the cornerstone of the discipline of World Englishes (Kachru, 1985), with antecedents dating back to the early post-war period (e.g., Partridge & Clark, 1951; Avis, 1954, 1955, 1956). Pluricentricity as a concept explains and to a degree predicts the development of national varieties from both a postcolonial perspective (see Schneider, 2007; Hickey, 2012) and an old-world viewpoint (see Kloss, 1967, 1978; Hickey, 2012). Major theoretical contributions in the framework are available by Michael Clyne (1984, 1992, 1995), Heinz Kloss (1967, 1993) and Ulrich Ammon (1995, 2016). The newcomer concept of “pluri-areality” is, by contrast, limited to German, where it has recently gained momentum (e.g., Elspaß, Dürscheid & Ziegler, 2017; Niehaus, 2015; Dürscheid & Elspaß, 2015). Some go so far as to reject the pluricentric concept outright (e.g., Herrgen, 2015; Elspaß & Niehaus, 2014; Glauninger, 2013), so much so that pluricentric accounts of German may today be in the minority (but see Schmidlin, 2011; Kellermeier-Rehbein, 2014; de Cillia & Ransmayr, 2019). It is claimed that “pluri-areality” is more “adequate, ”“neutral” and “postnational,” as the following quote illustrates: To avoid national implications Scheuringer suggests the adoption of the term “pluri-areality” (in agreement with Glauninger, 2013). The discussion within the Austrian Germanic Studies circles is being led with a certain political rather than linguistic bitterness, which is relatively easily avoided in the light of relatively transparent linguistic facts. 1 (Herrgen, 2015: 142) While the discussion has at times indeed been heated and bitter— after all, it’s about linguistic identities—the present paper probes the allegedly “relatively transparent linguistic facts” in Austria in relation to both the pluricentric and “pluri-areal” approaches. It seems time to take stock and ask what each of the two concepts stands for, how they model concrete sociolinguistic scenarios, and, finally, which concept captures speaker realities more adequately. This paper is to a considerable degree meta-theoretical. It is struc- tured as follows: section 2 visualizes the two concepts, followed by an argument-for-argument discussion of the case against pluricentricity in section 3, which is matched in section 4 with arguments against the “pluri-areal” perspective. In section 5, attitudinal data from Austria is tabled to reveal aspects of what the “pluri-areal” approach does not model, concluding that the pluricentric perspective is still the model of choice. From a knowledge-theoretical view point, three recommendations are made for sociolinguistic modelling, comprised of (a) a theory-driven approach that is rooted in the uniformitarian principle in linguistics, (b) a Popperian stance towards falsification with a more critical application of “bottom-up” data-driven models, and (c) an acknowledgement that definitions of language and variety Author for correspondence: Stefan Dollinger, Email: Stefan.Dollinger@ubc.ca Cite this article: Dollinger S. (2019) Debunking “pluri-areality”: On the pluricentric perspective of national varieties. Journal of Linguistic Geography 7: 98–112, https:// doi.org/10.1017/jlg.2019.9 © Cambridge University Press 2019. Journal of Linguistic Geography (2019), 7, 98–112 doi:10.1017/jlg.2019.9 https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/jlg.2019.9 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The University of British Columbia Library, on 12 Dec 2019 at 17:50:23, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at