One Standard German Axiom

The One Standard German Axiom (OSGA) is a concept used to describe the ongoing scepticism in German dialectology and linguistics towards the idea of multiple standard varieties. While multiple standard varieties are commonplace in English, Portuguese and Dutch today (e.g. American English, Brazilian Portuguese or Belgian Dutch), among many others, German scholars have repeatedly expressed their doubts about the idea or vitality of pluricentric languages in relation to the German language. The term One Standard German Axiom was first used by Austrian-Canadian UBC linguist Stefan Dollinger in his 2019 monograph The Pluricentricity Debate: On Austrian German and Other Germanic Standard Varieties and has since attracted debate, both in the scholarly and public domains. 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, as visualized in Figure 1.