ABSTRACT
In the broad sense, the full set of all regional, social, and functional, spoken and written variants of a historically and politically defined linguistic community. In the narrow sense, the standard language as opposed to the literary language (dialect and sociolect necessarily excluded) of a historically and politically defined linguistic community. In both inter-pretations the term is problematic, since frequently ‘nation’ and ‘language’ are not congruent for political or historical reasons. Consider, for example, the situation in multilingual countries such as the United States ( multilingualism), or the use of ‘German’ to describe the language spoken in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and Luxemburg.
