The One Standard German Axiom is a concept by Austrian-Canadian UBC linguist Stefan Dollinger in his 2019 monograph The Pluricentricity Debate, [1] used to describe what he believes is scepticism in German dialectology and linguistics towards the idea of multiple standard varieties. [2]
The concept of “pluricentric language” has been used in sociolinguistics and sociology of language since the 1960s. Multiple standard varieties are commonplace in English, Portuguese and Dutch today (e.g. American English, Brazilian Portuguese or Belgian Dutch), among many others, including German.
While the application of the pluricentric model for German has been undisputed at least since the work by Michael Clyne 1992, [2] recent research in German variational sociolinguistics [3] [4] [5] have refined the concept of “pluricentricity” (originally referring only to the national centers Austrian German, Swiss German, etc.) and contrasted it to “pluriareality“ (with potential centers inside or over national boundaries). [2]
Dollinger wants to “debunk” [6] the concept of pluriareality because he sees it proclaiming one standard variety of German, as visualized in Figure 1, while negating the existence and legitimacy of an independent Austrian national standard variety. Ultimately, he sees Austria’s national sovereignty questioned by proponents of the pluriareal approach. [7]
According to Dollinger, “pluriareality” counters "pluricentricity" as a term and the pluriareal approach does not meet scientific requirements. Dollinger equates “pluriareal German” with “monocentric German” and argues for the recognition of independent standard languages, each based on the dialects of the three national territories Austria, Germany, and Switzerland, according to Figure 2. [8]
Furthermore, Dollinger argues that by downgrading or even negating the relevance of national standard varieties of German, especially Standard Austrian German, the implied underlying modelling of the German language today has not changed to the time around 1850, [9] before the unification of Germany without Austria.
In his monograph from 2019, Dollinger coins the term “One German Axiom” or ”One Standard German Axiom" to describe the approach of (what he believes to be) pluricentric sceptics. [10] But his idea is older: already in 2016 he criticized the pluri-areal approach as “One Standard German Hypothesis“ in a conference paper. [11] In German, Dollinger writes about the “Axiom des Einheitsdeutschen”. [12]
Several prominent scholars in German linguistics and dialectology call Dollinger's One Standard German Axiom a “construct”. [13]
The uptake of Dollinger's book on The Pluricentricity Debate has also been expressly critical. One peer-reviewer for Oxford University Press, assessed Dollinger's original manuscript as “not publishable“ because it represents the perspective “of an Austrian more concerned about his linguistic identity, than as an academic soberly gauging the debate“. [14] In his study on linguistic pluricentricity, discussing in particular Austrian German, German sociolinguist Peter Auer does not mention the “Axiom” but characterizes Dollinger's book as “addressing mainly a non-academic audience and [being] based mostly on anecdotal evidence”. [15] Nils Langer, specialist of Frisian and minority sociolinguistics raises doubts about the coherence of Dollinger's argumentation because he finds several simplifications and conceptual misunderstandings of basic concepts as well as out-of-the-air allegations. [2]
Not all Germanists respond negatively to the book, however. Julia Ruck – who mentions the One Standard German Axiom, but does not discuss this idea specifically – sees a lot of merit in Dollinger's presentation of pluri-areal versus pluri-centric approaches to the German standard languages. [16]
Whereas Dollinger's coining of “One Standard German Axiom” has not been taken up in German sociolinguistics and dialectology, Igor Ivaškovic considers One Standard Axiom a “thesis” and bases on it the postulation of a “One Standard Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Serbian Axiom”. [17] A similar one standard axiom has also been described for Catalan. [18]
Dollinger's works, especially the popular-scientific [19] book from 2021, have garnered interest in several Austrian media. In Wiener Zeitung the journalist Robert Sedlaczek summarized the book in his column and compared to his own popular book on Austrian German from 2004. Sedlaczek emphasizes Dollinger's strong view that nationalist German scholars in the field – in contrast to Austrians or Swiss – would question the concept of German pluricentricity in their research because of their „different socialization and academic training“. [20] As a reaction on Sedlaczek, the linguist Peter Wiesinger wrote a guest commentary in the same newspaper and argued that language nationalism doesn't evolve from scientific theory. [21]
Austrian German, Austrian Standard German (ASG), Standard Austrian German, Austrian High German, or simply just Austrian, is the variety of Standard German written and spoken in Austria and South Tyrol. It has the highest sociolinguistic prestige locally, as it is the variation used in the media and for other formal situations. In less formal situations, Austrians use Bavarian and Alemannic dialects, which are traditionally spoken but rarely written in Austria. It has been standardized with the publishing of the Österreichisches Wörterbuch in 1951.
German is a West Germanic language in the Indo-European language family, mainly spoken in Western and Central Europe. It is the most widely spoken and official or co-official language in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, and the Italian province of South Tyrol. It is also an official language of Luxembourg and Belgium, as well as a recognized national language in Namibia. There further exist notable German-speaking communities in France (Alsace), the Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia, Denmark, Romania and Hungary (Sopron).
Sociolinguistics is the descriptive study of the effect of any or all aspects of society, including cultural norms, expectations, and context, on language and the ways it is used. It can overlap with the sociology of language, which focuses on the effect of language on society. Sociolinguistics overlaps considerably with pragmatics and is closely related to linguistic anthropology.
Standard High German (SHG), less precisely Standard German or High German, is the umbrella term for the standardized varieties of the German language, which are used in formal contexts and for communication between different dialect areas. German is a pluricentric Dachsprache with currently three codified specific national varieties: German Standard German, Austrian Standard German and Swiss Standard German.
A standard language is a language variety that has undergone substantial codification of its grammar, lexicon, writing system, or other features. Typically, the varieties that undergo standardization are those associated with centers of commerce and government, used frequently by educated people and in news broadcasting, and taught widely in schools and to non-native learners of the language. Within a language community, standardization usually begins with a particular variety being selected, accepted by influential people, socially and culturally spread, established in opposition to competitor varieties, maintained, increasingly used in diverse contexts, and assigned high social prestige as a result of the variety being linked to the most successful people. As a sociological effect of these processes, most users of a standard dialect—and many users of other dialects of the same language—come to believe that the standard is inherently superior to, or consider it the linguistic baseline against which to judge, the other dialects. However, such beliefs are firmly rooted in social perceptions rather than any objective evaluation.
In sociolinguistics, an abstand language is a language variety or cluster of varieties with significant linguistic distance from all others, while an ausbau language is a standard variety, possibly with related dependent varieties. Heinz Kloss introduced these terms in 1952 to denote two separate and largely independent sets of criteria for recognizing a "language":
A pluricentric language or polycentric language is a language with several codified standard forms, often corresponding to different countries. Many examples of such languages can be found worldwide among the most-spoken languages, including but not limited to Chinese in mainland China, Taiwan and Singapore; English in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, South Africa, India, and elsewhere; and French in France, Canada, and elsewhere. The converse case is a monocentric language, which has only one formally standardized version. Examples include Japanese and Russian. In some cases, the different standards of a pluricentric language may be elaborated to appear as separate languages, e.g. Malaysian and Indonesian, Hindi and Urdu, while Serbo-Croatian is in an earlier stage of that process.
Autonomy and heteronomy are complementary attributes of a language variety describing its functional relationship with related varieties. The concepts were introduced by William A. Stewart in 1968, and provide a way of distinguishing a language from a dialect.
Dialectology is the scientific study of linguistic dialect. In the 19th century a branch of historical linguistics, dialectology is today by some considered a sub-field of sociolinguistics. It studies variations in language based primarily on geographic distribution and their associated features. Dialectology deals with such topics as divergence of two local dialects from a common ancestor and synchronic variation.
Heinz Kloss was a German linguist who was after World War II internationally recognised for his work on linguistic pluricentricity and linguistic minorities. Until 1945 he worked, like many philologists and linguists of German at the time, on the linguistic construction of peoples and was entangled in the NS system.
Geolinguistics has been identified by some as being a branch of linguistics and by others as being an offshoot of language geography which is further defined in terms of being a branch of human geography. When seen as a branch of linguistics, geolinguistics may be viewed from more than one linguistic perspective, something with research implications; approaches to geolinguistics involve the study of dialectology and of linguistic areal features.
Swiss Standard German, or Swiss High German, referred to by the Swiss as Schriftdeutsch, or German: Hochdeutsch, is the written form of one of four official languages in Switzerland, besides French, Italian, and Romansh. It is a variety of Standard German, used in the German-speaking part of Switzerland and in Liechtenstein. It is mainly written, and rather less often spoken.
Language secessionism is an attitude supporting the separation of a language variety from the language to which it has hitherto been considered to belong, in order for this variety to be considered a distinct language. This attitude was first analyzed in Catalan sociolinguistics but it is attested in other parts of the world.
The Österreichisches Wörterbuch, abbreviated ÖWB, is the official spelling dictionary of Standard German in Austria, i.e. of Austrian Standard German. It is edited by a group of linguists under the authority of the Austrian Federal Ministry of Education, Arts and Culture and contains a number of terms unique to Austrian German or that are more frequently used or differently pronounced there. A considerable amount of this "Austrian" vocabulary is also common in Southern Germany, especially Bavaria, and some of it is used in Switzerland as well. The most recent edition is the 44th from 2022. Since the 39th edition from 2001 the orthography of the ÖWB was adjusted to the German spelling reform of 1996.
Croatian is the standardised variety of the Serbo-Croatian pluricentric language mainly used by Croats. It is the national official language and literary standard of Croatia, one of the official languages of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, the Serbian province of Vojvodina, the European Union and a recognized minority language elsewhere in Serbia and other neighbouring countries.
South Tyrolean German or South Tyrolese is a dialect spoken in the northern Italian province of South Tyrol. It is generally considered to be a sub-variety of Southern Bavarian, and has many similarities with other South German varieties, in particular with varieties of Austrian Standard German. It may develop its own standard variety of German, though currently is linguistically heteronomous to German Standard German.
Prague German was the dialect of German spoken in Prague in what is now the Czech Republic. The written form of this dialect from the Luxembourg rule played an important role in the history of the German language for its balancing function between the written upper Austrian and southern German dialects and eastern Central dialects of central Germany, which later developed the spelling of Modern German writing.
Robert Sedlaczek is an Austrian journalist, Germanist and non-fiction author. He is best known for his works on aspects of the German language. In addition, he writes books and articles on cultural history topics. In his book Die Tante Jolesch und ihre Zeit. Eine Recherche he traced the history of the industrial family of the same name as well as the lawyer, Hugo Sperber. These people are characters in Friedrich Torberg's book Die Tante Jolesch.
Heinz-Dieter Pohl is an Austrian linguist and onomatologist.
Käsekrainer is a type of lightly smoked Brühwurst containing roughly torn bits of pork and 10% to 20% cheese cut into small cubes. They are sold all over Austria at Würstelstand outlets. It is a variety of Carniolan sausage. Käsekrainer was invented by two people from Upper Austria, chef Herbert Schuch from Buchkirchen and Franz Thalhammer in the late 1960s.
Firstly, it [pluricentricty of German, multiple German standard varieties] is an entirely political concept, based on the notion of Überdachung of the language area by a political state. As for the recent history of German, this would have had the somewhat odd consequence that on 3 October 1990, the German language has lost an entire national variety, namely GDR German, literally overnight.
Immer mehr hat es sich in den letzten Jahren gezeigt, daß der Terminus plurizentrisch den arealen Mustern des deutschen Sprachgebietes nicht gerecht werden kann.
Considering the findings and our interpretations thereof, the results contribute to the discussion of Herrgen's (2015) thesis of 'two alternative standards of orality' as follows: there seem to be fundamental evaluative frictions and incongruities regarding conceptualizations and parameters of "standard in Austria" in the minds of speakers and listeners.
there should be no room for pan-German (großdeutsch) perspectives in the name of linguistic science, which would mean breaking with a long-standing, field-defining practice
Letzlich liege dem [anti-plurizentrischen] Ansatz "the One German Axiom or the One Standard German Axiom" zugrunde
Die zweite Lehre aus der kanadischen Situation ist, das "Axiom des Einheitsdeutschen", das den Arbeiten der Kritiker zugrunde liegt, abzulehnen.
Er bezeichnet diese Haltung als «One Standard German Axiom»
nicht im Wissenschaftsjargon verfasst, sondern locker geschrieben, um ein großes Publikum zu erreichen