One Standard German Axiom

The One Standard German Axiom (OSGA) 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”.

More recently, connections of pre- and postwar German dialectology have been made explicit, centred in the Austrian dialectologist , who lived, according to Dollinger, by OSGA. Kranzmayer has been instrumental, Dollinger claims, as teacher of many Austrian dialectologists in a monocentric view of German.

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 eingbased 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

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