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The pluricentricity of German: academic ideal or everyday reality
What I am talking about today is related to a project I am working on with Melanie
Wagner from the University of Luxembourg and Eva Wyss from Koblenz University.
The aims of the project are to produce a comparative study of the role of teachers of
German as norm transmitters and norm authorities in three German-speaking
countries with very different ling and sociolinguistic constellations - Germany,
Luxembourg and Switzerland - and to throw some light on the extent to which the
pluricentric conception of German, which is the dominant model amongst academic
linguists, is relevant for ‘ordinary’ speakers, who have little or no academic training
in linguistic and sociolinguistic theory.
Clyne (1995) defines a pluricentric language as ‘a lang with several interacting
centres, each providing a national variety with at least some of its own (codified)
norms’. The reference to codified norms makes it clear he is talking here about
standard varieties of a language – in the German-speaking context the existence of a
codex is usually seen as a major constitutive factor of a standard variety, although it
does not seem to play such an important role in every speech community, e.g. in UK.
According to Ammon et al. (2004) these national standard varieties are equally valid
forms of the language rather than deviations from one supra-national form of standard
German and it seems that one reason – even if not always stated explicitly - for the
promotion of the pluricentric model is to increase the status of other standard varieties
vis à vis GSG, i.e. varieties like Lux or Swiss SG which have tended to be seen as
peripheral (Außendeutsch vs Binnendeutsch), an extension of the ‘difference, not
deficit’ approach to variation, central to modern sociolinguistics.
However, with the education system playing an important role in legitimating certain
varieties rather than others, such an aim is unlikely to succeed in practice if it is not
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shared by teachers as norm transmitters, and by policy makers and curriculum writers
who tell teachers what norms to transmit. Both these groups mediate between
theoretical concepts like pluricentricity and everyday practice. In our project we are
particularly interested in teachers as a sub-group of what we called ‘ordinary’
speakers as opposed to professional linguists. The grammar-school teachers of
German in our study are clearly not completely lacking in linguistic training since
they will have studied German as a subject at university and are likely to have taken at
least an introductory course in linguistics, but, despite that, I think we can safely say
that they are not experts in the same way as professional linguists.
The term ‘pluricentric’ need not be understood as a synonym of ‘plurinational’, but in
the German context it has tended to be interpreted in that way, with centres being
equated with nations, or at least states (Clyne’s definition which I’ve just cited refers
to national varieties). The introduction of the pluricentric model has certainly made
professional linguists and some text-book writers, mostly in the fields of German as a
foreign or second language, more aware of the national dimension of variation in
German, although some critics think that it over-estimates the importance of the state
borders between the Gm-speaking countries.
Some of the critics of the pluricentric model have suggested that the term ‘pluriareal’
is more appropriate to describe the situation in the German-speaking world, since it
accepts the fact of regional variation but does not link it to national centres. Those
who favour a pluriareal model argue that the pluricentric model downplays the
amount of internal variation within the states where German is spoken and also
implies that ‘national’ variants do not cross national borders. These are valid points
but we would argue with Clyne (1995: 25) that the critics do not always respect the
fact that the status of variants that exist in more than one national centre often differs,
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i.e. they may be regarded as standard in one centre but not over the border in another.
Despite the criticisms, we believe that the pluricentric (understood as plurinational)
model can still help us to conceptualise and understand one dimension of variation in
German. This is something we might wish to return to in the discussion.
Quite a lot has been written about how best to teach German as a pluricentric
language to foreigners learning German, either in a German-speaking country or
abroad, but there is little on the relevance of the model for teaching German to nativespeakers, e.g. no reference to it in the curricula for German in Germany or Lux. Some
of the CH curricula refer rather vaguely to ‘the characteristic features of the Swiss
language situation’ and say that pupils should know about them, but there is little
concrete information on what these are, and the only time we came across the term
‘Helvetismen’ (i.e. specifically Swiss features) was in the context of pupils being
required to avoid them.
There are a few studies which have tried to establish empirically how valid and
relevant the description of German as a pluricentric language is once we move outside
academia, e.g. Scharloth (2005) found that informants in Gm-speaking CH tended to
downgrade SSG forms relative to GSG forms, but Pfrehm (2011: 52) found that his
Austrian informants (and I quote) ‘do in fact perceive the 18 ASG lexical variants as
standard when asked to rate them in the context of “when writing a school essay” ’.
This could well reflect the different role played by standard German in each country,
but as A is not part of the present project I can’t really say more about this now.
Since the situation in the three countries represented in our project is so different I’ll
give a very brief characterisation of each one and I apologise in advance that I don’t
have time to do justice to the full complexity of the situations in this brief overview
but will pick out a few salient points.
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Switzerland
CH is usually described as a full centre in the pluricentric model (e.g. by Ammon
1995) because Swiss Standard German has been codified and the codified norms are
endonormative, i.e. produced in the national centre (this is what Ammon claims,
but…) . Gm-speaking CH was one of the examples used by Ferguson when he
introduced the concept ‘diglossia’ in his 1959 article (SG as the H variety and the
Swiss Gm dialects as the L variety), but it is debatable whether the term still
accurately describes the Swiss situation, with the Swiss German dialects (which are
very different from GSG and SSG) being used frequently in domains previously
reserved for SG. Berthele (2004), for example, suggests that ‘bilingualism’ would
correspond better to most speakers’ perceptions of the situation and a recent call by
some politicians for teachers to be brought from Gmy to teach standard German in
schools in German-speaking CH, as well as the campaigns against teaching two
foreign langs at primary schools (i.e. an extra one on top of st Gm) appear to back up
his claim.
Luxembourg
Lux sets great store by its image as a trilingual country with most native
Luxembourgers speaking French, German and Luxembourgish, even if not
necessarily all to the same standard or with equal enthusiasm. Lux is a Gmic variety,
closely related to the Moselle-Franconian varieties which are spoken in neighbouring
parts of Gmy and which are there regarded as non-standard dialects. In Lux the
official discourse constructs Gm and Luxembourgish as 2 autonomous langs, and the
1984 Language Law describes the latter as the ‘langue nationale’(law drawn up in
French). In the pluricentric model Luxembourg is usually described as a half centre
because it does not have its own endonormative codex although, acc’g to Clyne
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(1995), there are speakers/writers who are seen as models for ‘correct’ or acceptable
Luxembourg German.
Despite the fact that most official and much non-official discourse (e.g. readers’
letters) stresses that Lux is separate from German, in education the close relationship
with German is stressed in order to justify teaching literacy through German rather
than French. Gm is the medium of teaching at primary school and children are taught
to read and write in Gm not Lux.
Germany
It is often claimed that the link between language and national identity is particularly
strong in Germany. There is however no reference to German as official or national
language in the federal constitution, although there have been attempts recently to say
explicitly in the federal constitution that the language of the Federal Republic of
Germany is German (a prescriptive and not really accurate statement). In the
pluricentric model Gmy is seen as a full centre, with a comprehensive codex of
reference works containing endonormative norms. Some of these works lay claim to
being reference works of German in its entirety, not just of German German, but they
show their German-centricity by labelling variants that are typical of A, Lux or CH
but not those that are typical of Gmy – those are apparently seen as ‘normal’, as
acceptable everywhere in Gm-speaking world. This seems to reflect the old
Binnendeutsch ideology of a core surrounded by a periphery, rather than equal
centres.
Methods
We used questionnaires to collect data from 50 grammar-school teachers of German
in each country about how they (claim to) evaluate certain linguistic features (27) and
we also asked about the reference works they use and the context in which teaching
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happens. Teachers had three diff categories to choose from and they had to assume
they were marking written work. We also analysed a range of curricula for the
subject German in each country to see what they said about pluricentricity and the
status of different national varieties of standard German.
Curricula
Curricula are one of the most obvious channels through which explicit language
policy is mediated to the teachers and, through them, to pupils, but, as mentioned
above, there is no explicit mention of the concept of pluricentricity in the curricula for
any of the countries. Elspaß (2005) thinks that it will be very difficult to create a
pluricentric awareness amongst German speakers in Germany, since the awareness of
specifically German variants is almost totally lacking, and we found that the curricula
reflect (and maintain) this lack of awareness. In Switzerland most of the curricula
(produced at canton level) talk only of ‘the standard language’ or ‘High German’ with
no qualifying adjective, or if there is one, then it is often an evaluative adjective like
‘gepflegt’/cultivated. We found only two occurrences of the adjective
‘Schweizer’/Swiss used to qualify ‘standard German’. The curriculum for Bern is
rather confusing in that it says that pupils should aim to speak ‘correct Swiss standard
Gm’, but it also mentions helvetisms as something that pupils should be able to
recognise and overcome (‘überwinden’). So what is correct SSG? Is it a variety with
no helvetisms? If so, how is it different from any other form of st G? The curriculum
of the Zentralschweiz (valid for 7 cantons) also states that ‘The Swiss st lang differs
from the varieties of other regions of the Gm-lang area’ and, later on we read, ‘one
occasionally finds o.s. in sits which require a cultivated st lang, without having to
deny one’s Gm-Swiss origins’, but it is unclear what consequences this is meant to
have for the teaching of German and how teachers are meant to put this into practice.
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Teachers
We’ve looked at level of theory (academics) and policy makers (curricula) but what
do practitioners (teachers) claim to do? We’ll illustrate with two constructions from
the questionnaire.
Der Entscheid: The sentence ‘Der Entscheid ist mir nicht leicht gefallen’, which
includes the helvetism der Entscheid (GSG die Entscheidung = decision) was
corrected by 60% of the teachers in NRW and 62% in Luxembourg, but by only 18%
of Swiss teachers. None of the German or Luxembourgish teachers makes a comment
referring to its status as a Swiss variant, which is perhaps not surprising since it is not
marked as such in either the Duden: Deutsches Universalwörterbuch (2011) or the
Wahrig: Deutsches Wörterbuch (2011), two major monolingual dicitoniares. In light
of the comments in Ammon et al. (2005) that it is a helvetism which is more common
in Switzerland than Entscheidung, it is rather surprising that only 66% of the Swiss
teachers said it was always acceptable, although a further 16% did say it would be
acceptable in certain text types (diffs between D and Lux, on the one hand, and CH on
the other are significant at the 0.001 level, using Fischer’s Exact Test).
Das Kamin (fireplace, masc in Gmy and Lux, neut and masc codified as correct in
CH): The first surprise was that 12% of the NRW teachers said ‘das Kamin’ would
always be right. The next surprise was that only 24% of the Swiss teachers said this
form would always be acceptable. It’s a form that is regularly cited as characteristic of
SSG (e.g. Clyne 1995). Having said that, there is significantly more acceptance of the
neuter form in CH (diff between CH and Gmy is significant at .05 level, and diff
between CH and L is significant at 0.01 level).
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Conclusions
There is little evidence that the pluricentric model has made much of an impact
outside academia. Our analysis of the curricula for grammar schools in Germany,
Luxembourg and Switzerland found no explicit references to the term pluricentricity,
and we found only one reference - in the Bern curriculum - to a variety of standard
German that was designated as specific to one country. Such a gap is less surprising in
Germany since it reflects the monocentricity that Clyne (1992) considers one of the
characteristics of a dominant centre, but is less comprehensible in the other two
countries, where issues to do with language, including the role of German, are rarely
out of the media or everyday conversations. Educational policy seems to have a rather
large blind spot when it comes to certain aspects of sociolinguistic reality. This is all
the more surprising in view of the fact that most, if not all, curricula require teachers
to raise awareness of the situational and regional dimensions of variation in German
and to teach pupils to communicate appropriately.
It appears that teachers are very much left to their own devices when it comes to
national varieties of standard German and are given little concrete guidance on how to
manage in what has always been a complex situation and is becoming even more so
(e.g. increasingly heterogeneous and multilingual classrooms).
The reactions of the teachers to the variants do not seem to reflect a particularly
marked consciousness – or rather acceptance - of separate national norms and also
makes one wonder how accurate some of the descriptions of SSG in our textbooks
are.