Foundation and objectives of the WGNDV-Working Group
The ‘International Working group on Non-dominant Varieties of Pluricentric Languages’ (WNDV) was founded in 2010 by an initiative of Rudolf Muhr and has carried on its work ever since by organising international conferences. It assembles scholars from around the world interested in doing research on varieties of pluricentric languages that are not dominating the linguistic and communicative norms of a language and often have to justify their ‘otherness’.
The WGNDV tries to fill a gap in research as there has not been a systematic documentation of non-dominant varieties, their status and common social-pyschological aspects in relation to dominant and other non-dominant varieties of the same pluricentric language.
The main objectives of the work of the WGNDV are to document the situation of the non-dominant varieties worldwide in order to identify common or diverging features and to draw conclusions for their codification, corpus and status planning. Furthermore, we want to bring together scholars already working on these varieties and to interest others to join the working group and contribute to its research objectives.
The WGNDV is associated with the Austrian German Association (AGA) which is hosting the PCL web site.
Our Work – Topics of the WGNDV
- The sociolinguistic/demographic situation of non-dominant varieties in general.
- The overall relationship between the non-dominant and the dominant variety (acceptance/non-acceptance of the pluricentricity of the language etc.).
- Specific language policies of non-dominant varieties in respect to the dominant varieties and vice versa.
- The attitudes (status, loyalty etc.) of speakers of non-dominant varieties towards their own variety and towards the dominant variety.
- The treatment of the norms of the non-dominant variety in lexicography and education: Is there a preference for exogene (dominant) or endogene (native) norms in codification and the transfer to the younger generations?
- The situation of codification and corpus planning, codifying institutions, dictionaries, regulations governing codification, joint institutions that regulate the codification (e.g. orthography) across different varieties.
- The situation of status planning (Is there any?).
- The treatment of the norms of the non-dominant variety in education: are they taught explicitly, implicitly or not at all?
- The treatment of pronunciation features and lexical items of the non-dominant variety in dictionaries and in orthography (adapted/not adapted).
- The influence of the dominant variety/ies on the non-dominant variety (lexicon, pronunciation, grammar, phraseology, pragmatics etc.) and vice versa
Membership
We would like to encourage scholars to join the WGNDV and contribute to its work by attending the common conferences that are usually held biannually at different places around the world. Due to the CORONA-pandemic, we think of holding the conferences primarily online (which has already been the case in August 2021).
The membership is free of charge and requires only a declaration of the wish to join the group by completing the form below. By doing so, you will get information from time to time about activities of the group and the upcoming conferences.
