Stefan Dollinger will present an in-person research seminar on January 17th at 3:30.
Title
The Pluricentricity Debate and the long reach of 19th-century linguistics: dehegemonization as an urgent desideratum for a more equitable sociolinguistics
Abstract
This talk retraces the interesting parts of my thinking over the past decade. Starting with a cross-linguistic comparison of the social situations of Canadian English and Austrian German, it led me to identify silo-concepts in German dialectology that, at first glance, may seem alright (The Pluricentricity Debate, Dollinger 2019a). I used that insight and commenced research into the history of German dialectology to suggest that relevant fields within German linguistics are fraught with a “One Standard German Axiom”, i.e. that linguists are not “neutrally” approaching what they call “German” and, inadvertently, discriminate against younger standards of German (Austrian or Swiss German, with South Tyrolean German approaching its own standard form). After a dive into the archives (Dollinger 2024), I strongly suggested that legacy data, e.g. as used by the Marburg Sprachatlas or the Vienna Bavarian dictionary projects, which go back the height of pan-German (großdeutsch) thought, ought to be screened for lingering Nazi-bias before being analyzed as data today.
The pushback has been astonishing (Dollinger 2021, Langer 2021), with a resolution not yet in sight. Meanwhile, I became aware of a prominent Canadian fascist linguist working on my own project in Canadian English (Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles, DCHP-2). This linguist, Charles B. Crate, was one the “Big Six” of CanE (Dollinger 2019b) and, as discovered in March 2024 (Lehrer 2024), in the 1930s the leader of the “Canadian Union of Fascists”. This sad fact gave me an opportunity to show the German colleagues on my own data what I have in mind in terms of dehegemonization and decolonization. The entanglement of linguistics with nationalist and, indeed, fascist thought via linguistic concepts and presuppositions (e.g. Watts 2011) is, I try to show, a profound problem today that cannot be solved by denialism. Such unexplored (indeed, in the German case: denied, Lameli 2022, Lenz et al. 2021) disciplinary legacy massively affects how we construct standard varieties and languages and, indirectly, our view of non-standard varieties. It biases linguistic analyses in ways that make linguistic complicit in hegemonic thought, which, I think, we cannot afford.
References
Dollinger, Stefan. 2024. Eberhard Kranzmayer’s dovetailing with Nazism: his fascist years and the ‘One Standard German Axiom (OSGA)’. Discourse & Society. Publ. 7 Aug. 2024. Online First. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09579265241259094
Dollinger, Stefan. 2021a. Response pertaining to the “Statement” from 9 September 2021 by Alexandra N. Lenz, Stephan Elspaß, Gerhard Budin, Stefan Michael Newerkla, and Arne Ziegler. https://www.academia.edu/62390449/ (14 Dec. 2022).
Dollinger, Stefan. 2019a. The Pluricentricity Debate: On Austrian German and Other Germanic Standard Varieties. London: Routledge.
Dollinger, Stefan. 2019b. Creating Canadian English: the Professor, the Mountaineer, and a National Variety of English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lameli, Alfred. 2022. Denial in question period in response to SD’s statement that “The Sprachatlas has been, from the beginning until WWII, a openly pan-German project”. Methods in Dialectology and Language Diversity, 4 Aug. 2022, Mainz, Germany.
Lehrer, Andy. 2024. Email to Stefan Dollinger with historical proof of the identical identities of Crate the dictionary man and Crate the fascist.
Lenz, Alexandra N. et al. 2021. Statement regarding Stefan Dollinger’s public talk “Österreichisches Deutsch oder Deutsch in Österreich? Über einen Problemfall, seit 1848, der Wissenschaftsgeschichte” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMf6pji_LfQ&t=3539s, held on August 25, 2021. Ascina.at talk. View Stefan Dollinger’s statement and a response at https://www.academia.edu/62390449/.
Watts, Richard. 2011. Language Myths and the History of English. New York: Oxford University Press.
