Pluricentric languages

Many languages are pluricentric in nature, i.e. they exist as a national or official language in more than one nation. They range from languages diffused widely across different continents, such as English or Spanish, to languages predominantly used in neighbouring countries, such as Dutch or Swedish. In the following we introduce readers to both foundational and more recent research of pluricentric languages, as well as current debates in the field. While the first attempts to describe the conditions typical of pluricentric languages appeared in the 1960s, it took until the 1980s for the field to establish itself, through theoretical as well as empirical accounts of pluricentricity. From early on, there have been accounts of the power relationships between different varieties of pluricentric languages, in particular with regard to power asymmetries between national varieties, often expressed as dominant versus non-dominant varieties. Among other things, this has resulted in extensive research into the varying status of non-dominant national, or sub-national, varieties, an endeavour which also draws attention to language ideologies and linguistic rights of national (and other) varieties of pluricentric languages. A related issue here concerns whether the description primarily should follow national borders or concern regional variation within a language, often subsumed under the headings pluricentricity and pluriareality respectively. Parallel to such theoretically motivated inquiry, there has been substantial empirical research from the outset. The early, foundational work in the field was primarily concerned with the description of linguistic structural differences, such as phonological, morphological or lexical variation between varieties of pluricentric languages. This interest has hardly abated, but it has been complemented by other perspectives in more recent years. In particular, there has been an increasing emphasis on pragmatic and interactional variation. The shift in interest to include pragmatic variation can to a large extent be credited to work within the field variational pragmatics where pluricentricity is treated as a case of regional variation. While studies in variational pragmatics have explored micro-pragmatic variation, based on both experimental and actual discourse, more recently others have focused on the sequentiality of authentic interactional data from the perspective of conversation analysis and interactional linguistics. Even though some methodological differences exist between variational pragmatics and the interactional paradigm, they also have much in common and there has been cross-fruition between the two.Peer reviewe