One Standard German Axiom

The One Standard German Axiom is a concept by Austrian-Canadian UBC linguist Stefan Dollinger in his 2019 monograph The Pluricentricity Debate, used to describe what he believes is scepticism in German dialectology and linguistics towards the idea of multiple standard varieties.

Background and development
The concept of “pluricentric language” has been used in sociolinguistics and sociology of language since the 1960s. Multiple standard varieties are commonplace in English, Portuguese and Dutch today (e.g. American English, Brazilian Portuguese or Belgian Dutch), among many others, including German.

While the application of the pluricentric model for German has been undisputed at least since the work by Michael Clyne 1992, recent research in German variational sociolinguistics  have refined the concept of “pluricentricity” (originally referring only to the national centers Austrian German, Swiss German, etc.) and contrasted it to “pluriareality“ (with potential centers inside or over national boundaries).

Dollinger wants to “debunk” the concept of pluriareality because he sees it proclaiming one standard variety of German, as visualized in Figure 1, while negating the existence and legitimacy of an independent Austrian national standard variety. Ultimately, he sees Austria’s national sovereignty questioned by proponents of the pluriareal approach.

According to Dollinger, “pluriareality” counters "pluricentricity" as a term and the pluriareal approach does not meet scientific requirements. Dollinger equates “pluriareal German” with “monocentric German” and argues for the recognition of independent standard languages, each based on the dialects of the three national territories Austria, Germany, and Switzerland, according to Figure 2.

Furthermore, Dollinger argues that by downgrading or even negating the relevance of national standard varieties of German, especially Standard Austrian German, the implied underlying modelling of the German language today has not changed to the time around 1850, before the unification of Germany without Austria.

In his monograph from 2019, Dollinger coins the term “One German Axiom” or ”One Standard German Axiom" to describe the approach of (what he believes to be) pluricentric sceptics. But his idea is older: already in 2016 he criticized the pluri-areal approach as “One Standard German Hypothesis“ in a conference paper. In German, Dollinger writes about the “Axiom des Einheitsdeutschen”.



Scholarly reception
Several prominent scholars in German linguistics and dialectology call Dollinger's One Standard German Axiom a “construct”.

The uptake of Dollinger's book on The Pluricentricity Debate has also been expressly critical. One peer-reviewer for Oxford University Press, assessed Dollinger's original manuscript as “not publishable“ because it represents the perspective “of an Austrian more concerned about his linguistic identity, than as an academic soberly gauging the debate“. In his study on linguistic pluricentricity, discussing in particular Austrian German, German sociolinguist Peter Auer does not mention the “Axiom” but characterizes Dollinger's book as “addressing mainly a non-academic audience and [being] based mostly on anecdotal evidence”. Nils Langer, specialist of Frisian and minority sociolinguistics raises doubts about the coherence of Dollinger's argumentation because he finds several simplifications and conceptual misunderstandings of basic concepts as well as out-of-the-air allegations.

Not all Germanists respond negatively to the book, however. Julia Ruck – who mentions the One Standard German Axiom, but does not discuss this idea specifically – sees a lot of merit in Dollinger's presentation of pluri-areal versus pluri-centric approaches to the German standard languages.

Whereas Dollinger's coining of “One Standard German Axiom” has not been taken up in German sociolinguistics and dialectology, Igor Ivaškovic considers One Standard Axiom a “thesis” and bases on it the postulation of a “One Standard Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Serbian Axiom”. A similar one standard axiom has also been described for Catalan.

Public reception
Dollinger's works, especially the popular-scientific book from 2021, have garnered interest in several Austrian media. In Wiener Zeitung the journalist Robert Sedlaczek summarized the book in his column and compared to his own popular book on Austrian German from 2004. Sedlaczek emphasizes Dollinger's strong view that nationalist German scholars in the field – in contrast to Austrians or Swiss – would question the concept of German pluricentricity in their research because of their „different socialization and academic training“. As a reaction on Sedlaczek, the linguist Peter Wiesinger wrote a guest commentary in the same newspaper and argued that language nationalism doesn't evolve from scientific theory.