Pluricentric Language

A pluricentric language or polycentric language is a language with several interacting codified standard forms, often corresponding to different countries.^[1][2][3]

Many examples of such languages can be found worldwide among the most-spoken languages, including but not limited to

Chinese in mainland China, Taiwan and Singapore;

English in the United Kingdom, the United States, India, and elsewhere; and

French in France, Canada, and elsewhere.^[4]

The converse case is a monocentric language, which has only one formally standardized version.

Examples include Japanese and Russian.^[5]

In some cases, the different standards of a pluricentric language may be elaborated until they become autonomous languages, as happened with Malaysian and Indonesian, and with Hindi and Urdu.^[5]

The same process is under way in Serbo-Croatian.^[5][6]