ABSTRACT
The final chapter weaves the assessments and various strands of this book together and organizes them into three recommendations, called safeguards, that ensure in the future that double concepts, “pluri-areality” is equivalent with “geographical variation” and an atheoretical, at best a descriptive term in the most general sense. In order not to confuse such terms with theoretical concepts such as pluricentricity, the uniformitarian principle in language study is expanded by an expressly horizontal reading (Fail-safe #1). By horizontal, Dollinger means the comparison of settings in synchrony, while the vertical reading would be the more traditional one used in historical linguistics. Fail-safe #2 demands, in keeping with Karl Popper’s science–theoretical principles, expressly articulated falsifiable theories. Pluricentricity can offer than, “pluri-areality” cannot. The idea, Fail-safe #3, that the “speaker is always right”, is used to say that we cannot use positivist methods to go against speaker wishes and perceptions, as is the case in “pluri-areality”. Finally, the language–political angle of “pluri-areality” is made the focus, and the protestations against the “objective” nature of the methods is shown as fallible. In the final section, the point is made that the One Standard German Axiom, the underlying base of opponents of pluricentricity, is found without equivalent in comparisons with Canadian and American English. It is concluded that if we treat these borders one way, we must treat the equivalent border of Austria and Germany in like manner, unless we fall prey to social agnosticism, to use one of Weinreich, Labov and Herzog’s (1968) terms. “Pluri-areality” is a non-concept that should be abandoned.
