Member News Spring 2020
Two books by Stefan Dollinger centered on the theme of pluricentricity (national perspectives on language variation) appeared in late 2019. The first, Creating Canadian English: the Professor, the Mountaineer, and a National Variety of English (Cambridge University Press, 2019) is lexicographic-historical in focus, as it details the development, implementation, and “invention” of Canadian English from the 1940s to the present. It is an archival study of long-forgotten linguists that may still be known in the lexicographical field: Walter S. Avis, Charles J. Lovell, and other members of the “Big Six”. Geared towards the general interest reader, the book is a mixed-genre account of the making of Canadian English. Frontmatter & Chapter 1: https://www.academia.edu/35184221/. The second book, The Pluricentricity Debate: On Austrian German and Other Germanic Standard Varieties (Routledge, 2019) is focused on Austrian German, which is presented in contrastive perspective with other Germanic varieties - Flemish, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Luxembourgish and, above all, English. This book critiques current practices in German dialectology, including lexicography, from epistemological, methodological, and practical perspectives....