Non-Dominant Varieties

German dialectology has had a central role in the conceptualization of political borders in language continua at least since Kremer's pioneering work (1979). In the early 1980s, Michael Clyne (1984, 1992, 1995) developed the concept of pluricentricity, which operates on the base of "linguistic centres" that, more often than not, can be equated with nations and their norm-providing and codification institutions. A decade or so later, Hermann Scheuringer (1996) proposed what he considered to be the counter concept of "pluriareality". While unheard and unknown in English linguistics, pluriareality is quite popular in German dialectology to this day, often at the expense of pluricentric approaches.

I maintain, as laid out in a recent talk, that pluricentricity is a theoretical concept, as it makes falsifiable predictions, while pluriareality is not (in Popper's sense). The latter is, in fact, a red-herring term that has set back considerably the discussion of regional (areal) variation in German dialectology.

This paper, from a sociolinguistic perspective, examines Albanian as a recipient language in contact situations in Albania, Kosovo and Macedonia, having the following structure: section 1. addresses historical and socio-political factors involved, section 2. presents examples of linguistic differences or varieties, highlighting the prescriptive approach of Albanian-speaking linguists. The last section concludes that varieties can be normative, Albanian urgently requires more work on standard varieties and needs a serious development of corpus-based studies.

To quote: Albana Muco, "Linguistic errors or varieties? Albanian and other languages in contact", in R. Muhr,  J. A. Mas Castells, J. Rueter (ed. by), European Pluricentric Languages in Contact and Conflict, Peter Lang Verlag, Berlin, 2020, pp. 185-197.

Aquest text és una reflexió, fruit d’una paràfrasi del text “Introduction. Révolutionner le masculin”, que Ivan Jablonka va incloure el 2019 al seu llibre Des homes justes. Explora coincidències i diferències entre el paper que han de tenir els homes heterosexuals en la igualtat de gènere i el que han de fer, per la igualtat interlingüística, els que hem anomenat parlants de llengües dominants i, per la igualtat intralingüística, els “parlants de varieetats dominants”. Hem descobert que aquest paral·lelisme ja l’han practicat Comajoan-Colomé i Rius Cruz, Sandra (2021), però no amb l’amplitud i l’aprofundiment que hem practicat nosaltres. Ignorem si aquesta comparació ja ha estat feta per altres autors, i per això agrairíem notícies en aquest sentit. Estímuls indirectes han estat Cardús (2021) i Lorente (2021). Per a l’anàlisi del concepte de justícia ens hem valgut dels treballs Michele Gazzola, Sergi Morales i Elvira Riera, El resultat, doncs, d’aquestes pàgines són uns quants interrogants oberts sobre aquests paral·lelismes.

Typical of many non-dominant varieties of pluricentric languages, U.S. Spanish does not have a codified standard. In earlier studies, the author described the code-switching, subject pronoun use, nominal possession and verbal system which characterize the Spanish spoken in Utica, NY, U.S. Although those parameters do not constitute a prescriptive standard, they could form a type of "linguistic standard and quasi codification set through usage" (Muhr, 2013: 30). The present study continues to explore what might be a standard for Utica Spanish, and U.S. Spanish, in general, and compares the parameters mentioned above with those of written Spanish obtained from El despertar hispano-americano, a column published in the Utica newspaper Observer-Dispatch (O-D). The parameters exhibit very different values which might be explained by the existence of different standards which govern communicative functions.