Orð og tunga - 01.06.2014, Page 63

Elspafi and Niehaus: Standardization of a pluriareal language
51
not restricted to one country alone. 'Pure' national variants may even
be the exceptional case in the German speaking countries. Figure 1
(adopted from Scherr & Niehaus 2013:78) may serve to illustrate a
more realistic picture of the areal variation in the German-speaking
countries.
Because of such empirical evidence, some researchers would pre-
fer to talk of Standard German as a pluriareal language (e.g. Wolf
1994, Scheuringer 1997). This is the approach that we adopt, hence
step 2 on the way to our corpus design.
The competing concepts of 'pluricentric German' vs. 'pluriareal
German' have sparked a controversy (mainly between German and
Austrian scholars) about the historical adequacy of the two models
(cf. von Polenz 1999, Reiffenstein 2001). In our view, the debate would
profit from empirical evidence from present-day as well as historical
data, as we will try to demonstrate in section 4 of this paper.
area A variant x: 70% variant y: 30%
area C variant x: 20% variant y: 20% variant z: 60%
area B variant x: 30% variant y: 70%
Fig. 1. Relative areal variation in a pluriareal language community (example)
3 A corpus design for a modern pluriareal lan-
guage
What follows from such considerations and alternative concepts for
the design of corpora to allow for painting a more realistic (or rather
adequate) picture of standardization processes? The requirement for
such a corpus is that it contains historical as well as present-day data
which can help us to explain the areal variation and also the on-go-
ing change of a modern language in a long-term perspective. As for
German, we introduce a corpus design which both accounts for the
pluriareality of German and considers historical data 'from above' as
Well as 'from below'.
In a 'view from above', we look at written (standard) language