Pluricentric Theory beyond Dominance and Non-dominance: A Critical View
The present volume contains ten contributions. Six of them were presented in Stockholm at the workshop “The Theory and Description of Pluricentric Languages- Beyond Concepts of Dominance and Non-Dominance, which was hosted at the conference “The Languages, Nations, Cultures: Pluricentric Languages in Context(s) Conference was held at Stockholm University in May 2019. Four other contributions have been accepted because some of the papers presented at the workshop could not be delivered because of difficulties beyond the control of the authors.
Although many of these papers still utilize the concepts of dominance and non-dominance, they are used to advance the theory of pluricentricity in general or are used as tools to explain other linguistic or social phenomena. Each contribution, in its own way, is a testimony to the usefulness of pluricentricity as a theoretical framework. And, they show that the alternative concept of “pluriareality” that is favoured by some linguists working on German has no theoretical basis and cannot describe pluricentric languages correctly.
Pluricentric Languages and Non-Dominant Varieties Worldwide: New pluricentric languages-old problems
This volume comprises 30 selected papers that were presented at the “5th World Conference of Pluricentric Languages and their non-dominant Varieties (WCPCL) held at the University of Mainz (Germany) in 2017. The authors come from 15 countries and deal with 14 pluricentric languages and 31 (non-dominant) varieties around the world. The number of known PLCLs has again been extended. There are now 43 PLCLs in all. Apart from a large number of papers on Spanish, French and Portuguese, “new” and little researched PLCLs are also presented in the volume: Albanian, Hungarian, Malay, Persian, Somali and Romanian.