ABSTRACT
The chapter begins with two main points of critique by the non-pluricentrists of German, who go by the name of “pluri-arealists”. Stefan Dollinger then schematizes in visual form the concepts behind pluricentricity and “pluri-areality”, using Peter Trudgill’s classic pyramid of social and regional variation. The dialectological context is then given, in which languages do split up (Czech/Slovak) or merge (the two Germanies, FRG/GDR), which only pluricentricity can describe. Hermann Scheuringer, one of the fiercest critics of pluricentricity, is then shown to have originally been an avant-garde pluricentrist in a 1985 paper, before taking in 1990 a radical conceptual U-turn. It is noteworthy that no rationale for the change is found. Scheuringer’s study on the Austria–Bavaria border is then critiqued for its bias. This study, which allowed the term of “pluri-areality” to survive the 1990s, is shown for its skewed tendencies and its foregrounding of language history over more recent sociolinguistic developments in a frameset that undercuts linguistic autonomy and bestows heteronomy forever onto a given variety or region in a static form of dialectology.
