Pluricentric language

A pluricentric language or polycentric language is a language with several interacting codified standard versions, often corresponding to different countries. Examples include English, French, Portuguese, German, Korean, Spanish, Swedish, Armenian and Chinese. A language that has only one formally standardised version is monocentric. Examples include Russian and Japanese.

In some cases the different standards of a pluricentric language may be elaborated until they become autonomous languages, as happened with Malaysian and Indonesian or Hindi and Urdu. The same process is underway in Serbo-Croatian.

Pre-Islamic Arabic can be considered a polycentric language. In Arabic-speaking countries different levels of polycentricity can be detected.Modern Standard Arabic is a pluricentric language with varying branches correlating with different regions where Arabic is spoken and the type of communities speaking it. The main varieties of Arabic include Gulf Arabic (spoken in the Persian Gulf kingdoms of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain and Kuwait), Iraqi Arabic, Levantine Arabic (spoken in Levantine countries of Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Palestine), Egyptian Arabic, Sudanese Arabic, Maghrebi Arabic (spoken in North Africa) and Judeo-Arabic (spoken by Arab Jewish communities), among many others.

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