[1][2][3][4] Many examples of such languages can be found worldwide among the most-spoken languages, including but not limited to Chinese in the People's Republic of China, Taiwan and Singapore; English in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, South Africa, India, and elsewhere; and French in France, Canada, and elsewhere.
This is also the most commonly used name in Catalonia, but also in Andorra and the Balearic Islands, probably due to the prestige of the Central Catalan dialect spoken in and around Barcelona.
One reason for this is political (see Serbo-Croatian for a similar situation), but this variant does have its own literary tradition that dates back to the Reconquista.
Although mutually intelligible with other varieties of Catalan, Valencian has lexical peculiarities and its own spelling rules, which are set out by the Acadèmia Valenciana de la Llengua, created in 1998.
For their part, there are specific varieties in the two major Balearic islands, Mallorcan (Catalan: mallorquí) in Mallorca, Menorcan (menorquí) in Menorca, Ibizan (eivissenc) in Ibiza.
[16] As of 2021, the hypothesis that Eastern South Slavic, 'Greater Bulgarian', 'Bulgaro-Macedonian', or simply 'Bulgarian', is a pluricentric language with several mutually intelligible official standards in the same way that Serbo-Croatian is, and Czechoslovak used to be,[clarification needed] has not yet been fully developed in linguistics; it is a popular idea in Bulgarian politics, but an unpopular one in North Macedonia.
English was historically pluricentric when it was used across the independent kingdoms of England and Scotland prior to the Acts of Union in 1707.
Until the early 20th century, the French language was highly variable in pronunciation and vocabulary within France, with varying dialects and degrees of intelligibility, the langues d'oïl.
This, plus isolation from developments in France, most notably the drive for standardization by L'Académie française, make North American dialects of the language quite distinct.
Acadian French, spoken in New Brunswick, Canada, has many words no longer used in modern France, much of it having roots in the 17th century, and a distinct intonation.
Cajun French has some distinctions not found in Canada in that there is more vocabulary derived from both local Native American and African dialects and a pronunciation of the letter r that has disappeared in France entirely.
It is rolled, and with heavier contact with the English language than any of the above the pronunciation has shifted to harder sounding consonants in the 20th century.
In other standards of French, these numbers are usually denoted soixante-dix (sixty-ten), quatre-vingts (fourscore) and quatre-vingt-dix (fourscore-and-ten).
Although there is a uniform stage pronunciation based on a manual by Theodor Siebs that is used in theatres, and, nowadays to a lesser extent, in radio and television news all across German-speaking countries, this is not true for the standards applied at public occasions in Austria, South Tyrol and Switzerland, which differ in pronunciation, vocabulary, and sometimes even grammar.
Sometimes this even applies to news broadcasts in Bavaria, a German state with a strong separate cultural identity.
The varieties of Standard German used in those regions are to some degree influenced by the respective dialects (but by no means identical to them), by specific cultural traditions (e.g. in culinary vocabulary, which differs markedly across the German-speaking area of Europe), and by different terminology employed in law and administration.
A list of Austrian terms for certain food items has even been incorporated into EU law, even though it is clearly incomplete.
[26] Thus, both lects have the same dialectal basis, and linguistic sources still tend to treat the standards as different forms of a single language.
[citation needed] Nevertheless, they retain a high degree of mutual intelligibility despite a number of differences in vocabulary (including many false friends) and grammar.
Later in the late 1930s, the Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic promoted the use of Cyrillic alphabet, which remains the most widely used system today.
[28] The language spoken by Bukharan Jews is called Bukhori (or Bukharian), and is written in Hebrew alphabet.
The result is that communication between the two varieties of the language without previous exposure can be occasionally difficult, although speakers of European Portuguese tend to understand Brazilian Portuguese better than vice versa, due to the heavy exposure to music, soap operas etc.
Word ordering can be dramatically different between European and Brazilian Portuguese, without significantly hampering mutual intelligibility.
A number of creoles of Portuguese have developed in African countries, for example in Guinea-Bissau and on the island of São Tomé.
[29] Serbo-Croatian is a pluricentric language[30] with four standards (Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Serbian) promoted in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Montenegro, and Serbia.
[43] Spanish has both national and regional linguistic norms, which vary in terms of vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation, but all varieties are mutually intelligible and the same orthographic rules are shared throughout.
[47][48][49] In Argentina and Uruguay the Spanish standard is based on the local dialects of Buenos Aires and Montevideo.
[50] The Judeo-Spanish (also known as Ladino; not to be confused with Latino) spoken by Sephardi Jews can be found in Israel and elsewhere; it is usually considered a separate language.
[54] There are some spelling differences, particularly in the greater use of Grantha letters to write loanwords and foreign names in Sri Lanka, Singapore and Malaysia.