One Standard German Axiom

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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]

Contents

Background and development

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]

Figure 1: Visualization of the modelling of German based on the One Standard German Axiom (following Dollinger, Pluricentricity Debate, 2019, Figure 4.2) OSGA-eng.jpg
Figure 1: Visualization of the modelling of German based on the One Standard German Axiom (following Dollinger, Pluricentricity Debate, 2019, Figure 4.2)

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 equals “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]

Figure 2: Pluricentric German, with three standard varieties (following Dollinger, Pluricentricity Debate, 2019, Figure 4.1) Pluricentric German.png
Figure 2: Pluricentric German, with three standard varieties (following Dollinger, Pluricentricity Debate, 2019, Figure 4.1)

Scholarly reception

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]

Public reception

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]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Austrian German</span> Variety of Standard German

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">German language</span> West Germanic language

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":

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mòcheno language</span> Upper German variety of Italy

Mòcheno is an Upper German variety spoken in three towns of the Bersntol, in Trentino, northeastern Italy.

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.

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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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Croatian language</span> South Slavic language

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References

  1. ↑ Dollinger, Stefan (2019). The Pluricentricity Debate: On Austrian German and other Germanic Standard Varieties. Routledge FOCUS Short Monographs.
  2. 1 2 3 4 Langer, Nils (2022). "Review of The Pluricentricity Debate". Zeitschrift für Rezensionen zur Germanistischen Sprachwissenschaft. 13 (1–2): 2–9. doi: 10.1515/zrs-2020-2060 . S2CID   234011977.
  3. ↑ Elspass, Stephan; Niehaus, Konstantin (2014). "The standardization of a modern pluriareal language: concepts and corpus designs for German and beyond". Ord & Tunga [Word and language]. p. 50. 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.
  4. ↑ Scheuringer, Hermann (1996). "Das Deutsche als pluriareale Sprache: Ein Beitrag gegen staatlich begrenzte Horizonte in der Diskussion um die deutsche Sprache in Österreich". Unterrichtspraxis / Teaching German. 29 (2). Immer mehr hat es sich in den letzten Jahren gezeigt, daß der Terminus plurizentrisch den arealen Mustern des deutschen Sprachgebietes nicht gerecht werden kann.
  5. ↑ Koppensteiner, Wolfgang; Lenz, Alexandra N. (2020). "Tracing a standard language in Austria using methodological micro variations of verbal and matched guise technique". Linguistik Online. Vol. 102. p. 74. doi:10.13092/lo.102.6816. S2CID   229123301. 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.
  6. ↑ Dollinger, Stefan (2019). "Debunking "pluri-areality"". Journal of Linguistic Geography. 7 (2): 109. doi:10.1017/jlg.2019.9.
  7. ↑ Ruck, Julia (2020). "The Politics and Ideologies of Pluricentric German in L2 Teaching". Critical Multilingualism Studies. 8 (1): 22.
  8. ↑ Pohl, Heinz-Dieter (2018). "Exkurs: Gelehrtenstreit um mehrgestaltige Sprachen". Sprachspiegel (in German). 5: 143. Retrieved 2024-05-07.
  9. ↑ Dollinger, Stefan (2023). "Prescriptivism and national identity: sociohistorical constructionism, disciplinary blindspots, and Standard Austrian German". The Routledge Handbook Linguistic Prescriptivism. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. pp. 136 [ms. 17]. 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
  10. ↑ De Cillia, Rudolf; Ransmayr, Jutta (2019). Österreichisches Deutsch macht Schule: Bildung und Deutschunterricht im Spannungsfeld von sprachlicher Variation und Norm (in German). Vienna: Böhlau. p. 40. Letzlich liege dem [anti-plurizentrischen] Ansatz "the One German Axiom or the One Standard German Axiom" zugrunde
  11. ↑ De Cillia, Rudolf; Ransmayr, Jutta (2019). Österreichisches Deutsch macht Schule: Bildung und Deutschunterricht im Spannungsfeld von sprachlicher Variation und Norm (in German). Vienna: Böhlau. pp. 40, 242.
  12. ↑ Stefan Dollinger (2021), Österreichisches Deutsch in der Deutsch in Österreich? Identitäten im 21. Jahrhundert (3., durchges. und korrigierte ed.), Wien: new academic press, p. 173, Die zweite Lehre aus der kanadischen Situation ist, das "Axiom des Einheitsdeutschen", das den Arbeiten der Kritiker zugrunde liegt, abzulehnen.
  13. ↑ Lenz, Alexandra N. (2021). "Stellungnahme".
  14. ↑ Dollinger, Stefan (2019). The Pluricentricity Debate. OUP. p. x.
  15. ↑ Auer, Peter (2021). "Reflections on linguistic pluricentricity". Sociolinguistica. 35 (1): 42. doi:10.1515/soci-2021-0003.
  16. ↑ Ruck, Julia (2021). "Stefan Dollinger: The Pluricentricity Debate". ÖDaF-Mitteilungen: Fachzeitschrift für Deutsch als Fremd- und Zweitsprache. Band 37: 151. Retrieved 2024-05-08. Er bezeichnet diese Haltung als «One Standard German Axiom»
  17. ↑ Ivaškovic, Igor (2024). "Examining political influence on language: Contradictory linguistic lexical purging in the Croatian context". Journal of Language and Politics. doi:10.1075/jlp.23079.iva.
  18. ↑ Costa-Carreras, Joan. 2021. Compositionality, Pluricentricity, and Pluri-Areality in the Catalan Standardisation. In History of Catalonia and Its Implications for Contemporary Nationalism and Cultural Conflict, edited by Antonio Cortijo Ocaña and Vicent Martines, pp. 182-197. Hershey, PA: IGI Global, https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-7998-6614-5.ch13.
  19. ↑ Sedlaczek, Robert (2021). "Österreichisches Deutsch unter Druck". Wiener Zeitung. Archived from the original on 2023-06-09. Retrieved 2024-05-06. nicht im Wissenschaftsjargon verfasst, sondern locker geschrieben, um ein großes Publikum zu erreichen
  20. ↑ Sedlaczek, Robert (2021). "Österreichisches Deutsch unter Druck". Wiener Zeitung. Archived from the original on 2023-06-09. Retrieved 2024-05-05.
  21. ↑ Wiesinger, Peter (2021-05-05). "Das Volk bestimmt die Sprache: Das österreichische Deutsch ist kein unveränderlicher hieratischer Block". Wiener Zeitung. Retrieved 2024-05-04.
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