A pluricentric language or polycentric language is a language with several codified standard forms, often corresponding to different countries. [1] [2] [3] [4] Many examples of such languages can be found worldwide among the most-spoken languages, including but not limited to Chinese in the People's Republic of 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. [5] The converse case is a monocentric language, which has only one formally standardized version. Examples include Japanese and Russian. [6] 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. [6]
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Pre-Islamic Arabic can be considered a polycentric language. [7] In Arabic-speaking countries different levels of polycentricity can be detected. [8] Modern Arabic is a pluricentric language with varying branches correlating with different regions where Arabic is spoken and the type of communities speaking it. The vernacular varieties of Arabic include:
In addition, many speakers use Modern Standard Arabic in education and formal settings. Therefore, in Arabic-speaking communities, diglossia is frequent.
The Armenian language is a pluricentric language with two standard varieties, Eastern Armenian and Western Armenian, which have developed as separate literary languages since the eighteenth century. [9] Prior to this, almost all Armenian literature was written in Classical Armenian, which is now solely used as a liturgical language. Eastern and Western Armenian can also refer to the two major dialectal blocks into which the various non-standard dialects of Armenian are categorized. Eastern Armenian is the official language of the Republic of Armenia. It is also spoken, with dialectal variations, by Iranian Armenians, Armenians in Karabakh (see Karabakh dialect), and in the Armenian diaspora, especially in the former Soviet Union (Russia, Georgia, Ukraine). Western Armenian is spoken mainly in the Armenian diaspora, especially in the Middle East, France, the US, and Canada.
Additionally, Armenian is written in two standard orthographies: classical and reformed Armenian orthography. The former is used by practically all speakers of Western Armenian and by Armenians in Iran, while the latter, which was developed in Soviet Armenia in the 20th century, is used in Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh.
In the modern era, Catalan is a pluricentric language with differences in pronunciation and vocabulary. This language is internationally known as Catalan, as in Ethnologue. This is also the most commonly used name in Catalonia, but also in Andorra and the Balearic Islands, probably due to the prestige of the Central Catalan dialect spoken in and around Barcelona. However, in the Valencian Community, the official name of this language is Valencian. One reason for this is political (see Serbo-Croatian for a similar situation), but this variant does have its own literary tradition that dates back to the Reconquista.
Although mutually intelligible with other varieties of Catalan, Valencian has lexical peculiarities and its own spelling rules, which are set out by the Acadèmia Valenciana de la Llengua, created in 1998. However, this institution recognizes that Catalan and Valencian are varieties of the same language. For their part, there are specific varieties in the two major Balearic islands, Mallorcan (Catalan : mallorquí) in Mallorca, Menorcan (menorquí) in Menorca, Ibizan (eivissenc) in Ibiza. The University of the Balearic Islands is the language regulator for these varieties.
Until the mid-20th century, most Chinese people spoke only their local varieties of Chinese. These varieties had diverged widely from the written form used by scholars, Literary Chinese, which was modelled on the language of the Chinese classics. As a practical measure, officials of the Ming and Qing dynasties carried out the administration of the empire using a common language based on northern varieties, known as Guānhuà (官話, literally "speech of officials"), known as Mandarin in English after the officials. Knowledge of this language was thus essential for an official career, but it was never formally defined. [10]
In the early years of the 20th century, Literary Chinese was replaced as the written standard by written vernacular Chinese, which was based on northern dialects. In the 1930s, a standard national language Guóyǔ (國語, literally "national language") was adopted, with its pronunciation based on the Beijing dialect, but with vocabulary also drawn from other northern varieties. [11] After the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949, the standard was known as Pǔtōnghuà (普通话/普通話, literally "common speech"), but was defined in the same way as Guóyǔ in the Republic of China now governing Taiwan. [10] It also became one of the official languages of Singapore, under the name Huáyǔ (华语/華語, literally "Chinese language").
Although the three standards remain close, they have diverged to some extent. Most Mandarin speakers in Taiwan and Singapore came from the southeast coast of China, where the local dialects lack the retroflex initials /tʂ tʂʰ ʂ/ found in northern dialects, so that many speakers in those places do not distinguish them from the apical sibilants /ts tsʰ s/. Similarly, retroflex codas ( erhua ) are typically avoided in Taiwan and Singapore. There are also differences in vocabulary, with Taiwanese Mandarin absorbing loanwords from Min Chinese, Hakka Chinese, and Japanese, and Singaporean Mandarin borrowing words from English, Malay, and southern varieties of Chinese. [12] [13]
Some linguists and scholars, mostly from Bulgaria and Greece, but some also from other countries, [14] [15] consider Eastern South Slavic to be a pluricentric language with four standards: Bulgarian (based on the Rup, Balkan and Moesian ("Eastern Bulgarian") dialects), Macedonian (based on the Western and Central Macedonian dialects), Gorani (based on the Torlakian dialects), and Paulician (including Banat Bulgarian). [16] Politicians and nationalists from Bulgaria are likely to refer to this entire grouping as 'Bulgarian', and to be particularly hostile to the notion that Macedonian is an autonomous language separate from Bulgarian, which Macedonian politicians and citizens tend to claim. [16] As of 2021, the hypothesis that Eastern South Slavic, 'Greater Bulgarian', 'Bulgaro-Macedonian', or simply 'Bulgarian', is a pluricentric language with several mutually intelligible official standards in the same way that Serbo-Croatian is, and Czechoslovak used to be,[ clarification needed ] has not yet been fully developed in linguistics; it is a popular idea in Bulgarian politics, but an unpopular one in North Macedonia. [16]
English is a pluricentric language, [17] [18] with differences in pronunciation, vocabulary, spelling, etc., between each of the constituent countries of the United Kingdom, North America, the Caribbean, Ireland, English-speaking African countries, Singapore, India, and Oceania. Educated native English speakers using their version of one of the standard forms of English are almost completely mutually intelligible, but non-standard forms present significant dialectal variations, and are marked by reduced intelligibility.
British and American English are the two most commonly taught varieties in the education systems where English is taught as a second language. British English tends to predominate in Europe and the former British colonies of the West Indies, Africa, and Asia, where English is not the first language of the majority of the population. (The Falkland Islands, a British territory off the southeast coast of South America with English as its native language, have their own dialect, while British English is the standard.) In contrast, American English tends to dominate instruction in Latin America, Liberia, and East Asia [19] [20] (In Latin America, British English is taught in schools with British curriculum in countries with descendants of British settlers.)
Due to globalization and the resulting spread of the language in recent decades, English is becoming increasingly decentralized, with daily use and statewide study of the language in schools growing in most regions of the world. However, in the global context, the number of native speakers of English is much smaller than the number of non-native speakers of English of reasonable competence. In 2018, it was estimated that for every native speaker of English, there are six non-native speakers of reasonable competence, [21] raising the questions of English as a lingua franca as the most widely spoken form of the language.
Philippine English (which is predominantly spoken as a second language) has been primarily influenced by American English. The rise of the call center industry in the Philippines has encouraged some Filipinos to "polish" or neutralize their accents to make them more closely resemble the accents of their client countries.
Countries such as Australia, New Zealand, and Canada have their own well-established varieties of English which are the standard within those countries but are far more rarely taught overseas to second language learners. [22] (Standard English in Australia and New Zealand is related to British English in its common pronunciation and vocabulary; a similar relationship exists between Canadian English and American English.)
English was historically pluricentric when it was used across the independent kingdoms of England and Scotland prior to the Acts of Union in 1707. English English and Scottish English are now subsections of British English.
In the modern era, there are several major loci of the French language, including Standard French (also known as Parisian French), Canadian French (including Quebec French and Acadian French), Belgian French, American French (for instance, Louisiana French), Haitian French, and African French.
Until the early 20th century, the French language was highly variable in pronunciation and vocabulary within France, with varying dialects and degrees of intelligibility, the langues d'oïl. However, government policy made it so that the dialect of Paris would be the method of instruction in schools, and other dialects, like Norman, which has influence from Scandinavian languages, were neglected. Controversy still remains in France over the fact that the government recognizes them as languages of France, but provides no monetary support for them nor has the Constitutional Council of France ratified the Charter for Regional or Minority Languages.
North American French is the result of French colonization of the New World between the 17th and 18th centuries. In many cases, it contains vocabulary and dialectal quirks not found in Standard Parisian French owing to history: most of the original settlers of Quebec, Acadia, and later what would become Louisiana and northern New England came from Northern and Northwest France, and would have spoken dialects like Norman, Poitevin, and Angevin with far fewer speaking the dialect of Paris. This, plus isolation from developments in France, most notably the drive for standardization by L'Académie française, make North American dialects of the language quite distinct. Acadian French, spoken in New Brunswick, Canada, has many words no longer used in modern France, much of it having roots in the 17th century, and a distinct intonation. Québécois, the largest of the dialects, has a distinct pronunciation that is not found in Europe in any measure and a greater difference in vowel pronunciation, and syntax tends to vary greatly. Cajun French has some distinctions not found in Canada in that there is more vocabulary derived from both local Native American and African dialects and a pronunciation of the letter r that has disappeared in France entirely. It is rolled, and with heavier contact with the English language than any of the above the pronunciation has shifted to harder sounding consonants in the 20th century. Cajun French equally has been an oral language for generations and it is only recently that its syntax and features been adapted to French orthography.
Minor standards can also be found in Belgium and Switzerland, with particular influence of Germanic languages on grammar and vocabulary, sometimes through the influence of local dialects. In Belgium, for example, various Germanic influences in spoken French are evident in Wallonia (for example, to blink in English, and blinken in 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. Also, in Belgium and Switzerland, there are noted differences in the number system when compared to standard Parisian or Canadian French, notably in the use of septante, octante/huitante and nonante for the numbers 70, 80 and 90. In other standards of French, these numbers are usually denoted soixante-dix (sixty-ten), quatre-vingts (fourscore) and quatre-vingt-dix (fourscore-and-ten). French varieties spoken in Oceania are also influenced by local languages. New Caledonian French is influenced by Kanak languages in its vocabulary and grammatical structure. African French is another variety.
Standard German is often considered an asymmetric pluricentric language; [23] 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 Standard German and Swiss Standard German varieties. Although there is a uniform stage pronunciation based on a manual by Theodor Siebs that 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, South Tyrol and Switzerland, which differ in pronunciation, vocabulary, and sometimes even grammar. (In Switzerland, the letter ß has been removed from the alphabet, with ss as its replacement.) Sometimes this even applies to news broadcasts 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 to 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. [24] Scholarly scepticism in German dialectology about the pluricentric status of German has led some linguists to detect a One Standard German Axiom (OSGA) as active in the field.
The Hindi languages are a large dialect continuum defined as a unit culturally. Medieval Hindustani (then known as Hindavi [25] ) was based on a register of the Delhi dialect and has two modern literary forms, Standard Hindi and Standard Urdu. Additionally, there are historical literary standards, such as the closely related Braj Bhasha and the more distant Awadhi, as well as recently established standard languages based on what were once considered Hindi dialects: Maithili and Dogri. Other varieties, such as Rajasthani, are often considered distinct languages but have no standard form. Caribbean Hindi and Fijian Hindi also differ significantly from the Sanskritized standard Hindi spoken in India.
The Malay language has many local dialects and creolized versions, but it has two main normative varieties which are Malaysian and Indonesian: Indonesian is codified by Indonesia as its own lingua franca based on the dialect spoken in Riau Islands, whereas Malaysia codifies Malaysian based on the vernacular dialect of Johor. [26] Thus, both lects have the same dialectal basis, and linguistic sources still tend to treat the standards as different forms of a single language. [27] In popular parlance, however, the two varieties are often thought of[ who? ] as distinct tongues in their own rights due to the growing divergence between them and for political reasons.[ citation needed ] Nevertheless, they retain a high degree of mutual intelligibility despite a number of differences in vocabulary (including many false friends) and grammar.
Malayalam is a pluricentric language with historically more than one written form. Malayalam script is officially recognized, but there are other standardized varieties such as Arabi Malayalam of Mappila Muslims, Karshoni of Saint Thomas Christians and Judeo-Malayalam of Cochin Jews.
The Persian language has three standard varieties with official status in Iran (locally known as Farsi), Afghanistan (officially known as Dari), and Tajikistan (officially known as Tajik). The standard forms of the three are based on the Tehrani, Kabuli, and Dushanbe varieties, respectively.
The Persian alphabet is used for both Farsi (Iranian) and Dari (Afghan). Traditionally, Tajiki is also written with Perso-Arabic script. In order to increase literacy, a Latin alphabet (based on the Common Turkic Alphabet) was introduced in 1917. Later in the late 1930s, the Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic promoted the use of Cyrillic alphabet, which remains the most widely used system today. Attempts to reintroduce the Perso-Arabic script were made. [28]
The language spoken by Bukharan Jews is called Bukhori (or Bukharian), and is written in Hebrew alphabet.
Apart from the Galician question, Portuguese varies mainly between Brazilian Portuguese and European Portuguese (also known as "Lusitanian Portuguese", "Standard Portuguese" or even "Portuguese Portuguese"). Both varieties have undergone significant and divergent developments in phonology and the grammar of their pronominal systems. The result is that communication between the two varieties of the language without previous exposure can be occasionally difficult, although speakers of European Portuguese tend to understand Brazilian Portuguese better than vice versa, due to the heavy exposure to music, soap operas etc. from Brazil. Word ordering can be dramatically different between European and Brazilian Portuguese, without significantly hampering mutual intelligibility. [29]
A unified orthography for all the varieties (including a limited number of words with dual spelling) has been approved by the national legislatures of the Portuguese-speaking countries and is now official; see Spelling reforms of Portuguese for additional details. Formal written standards remain grammatically close to each other, despite some minor syntactic differences.
African Portuguese and Asian Portuguese are based on the standard European dialect, but have undergone their own phonetic and grammatical developments, sometimes reminiscent of the spoken Brazilian variant. A number of creoles of Portuguese have developed in African countries, for example in Guinea-Bissau and on the island of São Tomé. [29]
Serbo-Croatian is a pluricentric language [30] with four standards (Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Serbian) promoted in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Montenegro, and Serbia. [31] [32] [33] [34] [35] [36] These standards do differ slightly, but do not hinder mutual intelligibility. [37] [38] [39] [40] [41] [42] Rather, as all four standardised varieties are based on the prestige Shtokavian dialect, major differences in intelligibility are identified not on the basis of standardised varieties, but rather dialects, like Kajkavian and Chakavian. [34] "Lexical differences between the ethnic variants are extremely limited, even when compared with those between closely related Slavic languages (such as standard Czech and Slovak, Bulgarian and Macedonian), and grammatical differences are even less pronounced. More importantly, complete understanding between the ethnic variants of the standard language makes translation and second language teaching impossible." [36]
Spanish has both national and regional linguistic norms, which vary in terms of vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation, but all varieties are mutually intelligible and the same orthographic rules are shared throughout. [43]
In Spain, Standard Spanish is based upon the speech of educated speakers from Madrid. [44] All varieties spoken in the Iberian Peninsula are grouped as Peninsular Spanish. Canarian Spanish (spoken in the Canary Islands), along with Spanish spoken in the Americas (including Spanish spoken in the United States, Central American Spanish, Mexican Spanish, Andean Spanish, and Caribbean Spanish), are particularly related to Andalusian Spanish.
The United States is now the world's second-largest Spanish-speaking country after Mexico in total number of speakers (L1 and L2 speakers). A report said there are 41 million L1 Spanish speakers and another 11.6 million L2 speakers in the U.S. This puts the US ahead of Colombia (48 million) and Spain (46 million) and second only to Mexico (121 million). [45]
The Spanish of Latin Americans has a growing influence on the language across the globe through music, culture and television produced using the language of the largely bilingual speech community of US Latinos. [46] [47] [48]
In Argentina and Uruguay the Spanish standard is based on the local dialects of Buenos Aires and Montevideo. This is known as Rioplatense Spanish, (from Rio de la Plata (River Plate)) and is distinguishable from other standard Spanish dialects by voseo . In Colombia, Rolo (a name for the dialect of Bogotá) is valued for its clear pronunciation. [49] The Judeo-Spanish (also known as Ladino; not to be confused with Latino) spoken by Sephardi Jews can be found in Israel and elsewhere; it is usually considered a separate language.[ citation needed ]
Two varieties exist,[ citation needed ] though only one written standard remains (regulated by the Swedish Academy of Sweden): Rikssvenska (literally "Realm Swedish", also less commonly known as "Högsvenska", 'High Swedish' in Finland), 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 variety used in Finland remaining a little more conservative. The most marked differences are in pronunciation and intonation: Whereas Swedish speakers usually pronounce /k/ before front vowels as [ ɕ ], this sound is usually pronounced by a Swedo-Finn as [ t͡ʃ ]; in addition, the two tones that 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.
There are dialects that could be considered different languages due to long periods of isolation and geographical separation from the central dialects of Svealand and Götaland that came to constitute the base for the standard Rikssvenska. Dialects such as Elfdalian, Jamtlandic, and Gutnish all differ as much, or more, from standard Swedish than the standard varieties of Danish. Some of them have a standardized orthography, but the Swedish government has not granted any of them official recognition as regional languages and continues to look upon them as dialects of Swedish. Most of them are severely endangered and spoken by elderly people in the countryside.
The vast majority of Tamil speakers reside in southern India, where it is the official language of Tamil Nadu and of Puducherry, and one of 22 languages listed in the Eighth Schedule to the Constitution of India. It is also one of two official languages in Sri Lanka, one of four official languages in Singapore, and is used as the medium of instruction in government-aided Tamil primary schools in Malaysia. Other parts of the world have Tamil-speaking populations, but are not loci of planned development. [50]
Tamil is diglossic, with the literary variant used in books, poetry, speeches and news broadcasts while the spoken variant is used in everyday speech, online messaging and movies. While there are significant differences in the standard spoken forms of the different countries, the literary register is mostly uniform, with some differences in semantics that are not perceived by native speakers. There has been no attempt to compile a dictionary of Sri Lankan Tamil. [51]
As a result of the Pure Tamil Movement, Indian Tamil tends to avoid loanwords to a greater extent than Sri Lankan Tamil. Coinages of new technical terms also differ between the two. [52] Tamil policy in Singapore and Malaysia tends to follow that of Tamil Nadu regarding linguistic purism and technical coinages. [53]
There are some spelling differences, particularly in the greater use of Grantha letters to write loanwords and foreign names in Sri Lanka, Singapore and Malaysia. The Tamil Nadu script reform of 1978 has been accepted in Singapore and Malaysia, but not Sri Lanka. [54]
A dialect is a variety of language spoken by a particular group of people. It can also refer to a language subordinate in status to a dominant language, and is sometimes used to mean a vernacular language.
Serbo-Croatian – also called Serbo-Croat, Serbo-Croat-Bosnian (SCB), Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian (BCS), and Bosnian-Croatian-Montenegrin-Serbian (BCMS) – is a South Slavic language and the primary language of Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Montenegro. It is a pluricentric language with four mutually intelligible standard varieties, namely Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, and Montenegrin.
Slovene or Slovenian is a South Slavic language of the Balto-Slavic branch of the Indo-European language family. Most of its 2.5 million speakers are the inhabitants of Slovenia, majority of them ethnic Slovenes. As Slovenia is part of the European Union, Slovene is also one of its 24 official and working languages. Its syntax is highly fusional and characterized by dual grammatical number. Two accentual norms are used. Its flexible word order is often adjusted for emphasis or stylistic reasons, although basically it is a SVO language. It has a T–V distinction: the use of the V-form demonstrates a respectful attitude towards superiors and the elderly, while it can be sidestepped through the passive form.
Malay is an Austronesian language that is an official language of Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore, and that is also spoken in East Timor and parts of Thailand. Altogether, it is spoken by 290 million people across Maritime Southeast Asia.
Bosnian, sometimes referred to as Bosniak language, is the standardized variety of the Serbo-Croatian pluricentric language mainly used by ethnic Bosniaks. Bosnian is one of three such varieties considered official languages of Bosnia and Herzegovina, along with Croatian and Serbian. It is also an officially recognized minority language in Croatia, Serbia, Montenegro, North Macedonia and Kosovo.
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.
Standard Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Serbian are different national variants and official registers of the pluricentric Serbo-Croatian language.
A standard language is any language variety that has undergone substantial codification of its grammar, lexicon, writing system, or other features and that stands out among related varieties in a community as the one with the highest status or prestige. Often, it is the prestige language variety of a whole country.
In linguistics, diglossia is where two dialects or languages are used by a single language community. In addition to the community's everyday or vernacular language variety, a second, highly codified lect is used in certain situations such as literature, formal education, or other specific settings, but not used normally for ordinary conversation. The H variety may have no native speakers within the community. In cases of three dialects, the term triglossia is used. When referring to two writing systems coexisting for a single language, the term digraphia is used.
A dialect continuum or dialect chain is a series of language varieties spoken across some geographical area such that neighboring varieties are mutually intelligible, but the differences accumulate over distance so that widely separated varieties may not be. This is a typical occurrence with widely spread languages and language families around the world, when these languages did not spread recently. Some prominent examples include the Indo-Aryan languages across large parts of India, varieties of Arabic across north Africa and southwest Asia, the Turkic languages, the varieties of Chinese, and parts of the Romance, Germanic and Slavic families in Europe. Terms used in older literature include dialect area and L-complex.
A phonemic orthography is an orthography in which the graphemes correspond consistently to the language's phonemes, or more generally to the language's diaphonemes. Natural languages rarely have perfectly phonemic orthographies; a high degree of grapheme–phoneme correspondence can be expected in orthographies based on alphabetic writing systems, but they differ in how complete this correspondence is. English orthography, for example, is alphabetic but highly nonphonemic.
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":
Literary language is the form (register) of a language used when writing in a formal, academic, or particularly polite tone; when speaking or writing in such a tone, it can also be known as formal language. It may be the standardized variety of a language. It can sometimes differ noticeably from the various spoken lects, but the difference between literary and non-literary forms is greater in some languages than in others. If there is a strong divergence between a written form and the spoken vernacular, the language is said to exhibit diglossia.
In linguistics, mutual intelligibility is a relationship between different but related language varieties in which speakers of the different varieties can readily understand each other without prior familiarity or special effort. Mutual intelligibility is sometimes used to distinguish languages from dialects, although sociolinguistic factors are often also used.
Shtokavian or Štokavian is the prestige supradialect of the pluricentric Serbo-Croatian language and the basis of its Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian and Montenegrin standards. It is a part of the South Slavic dialect continuum. Its name comes from the form for the interrogative pronoun for "what" što. This is in contrast to Kajkavian and Chakavian.
Dialectology is the scientific study of dialects: subsets of languages. Though in the 19th century a branch of historical linguistics, dialectology is often now considered a sub-field of, or subsumed by, 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.
Linguistic purism or linguistic protectionism is a concept having a dual notion with respect to foreign languages and with respect to the internal variants of a language (dialects) The first meaning is the historical trend of every language to conserve intact its lexical structure of word families, in opposition to foreign influence which are considered 'impure'. The second meaning is the practice, possibly prescriptive, of determining and recognizing one linguistic variety (dialect) as being purer or of intrinsically higher quality than other varieties.
Southwestern Mandarin, also known as Upper Yangtze Mandarin, is a Mandarin Chinese dialect spoken in much of Southwestern China, including in Sichuan, Yunnan, Chongqing, Guizhou, most parts of Hubei, the northwestern part of Hunan, the northern part of Guangxi and some southern parts of Shaanxi and Gansu.
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.
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.
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: CS1 maint: postscript (link)whatever might be claimed by other centres, such as Valladolid, it was educated varieties of Madrid Spanish that were mostly regularly reflected in the written standard.