Concept
A pluricentric language or polycentric language is a language with several interacting codified standard forms, often corresponding to different countries. 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. The converse case is a monocentric language, which has only one formally standardized version. Examples include Japanese and Russian. 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. The same process is under way in Serbo-Croatian. Varieties of Arabic Pre-Islamic Arabic can be considered a polycentric language. In Arabic-speaking countries different levels of polycentricity can be detected. Modern Arabic is a pluricentric language with varying branches correlating with different regions where Arabic is spoken and the type of communities speaking it. The vernacular varieties of Arabic include: Peninsular Arabic Hejazi Arabic (urban cities of western Saudi Arabia) Najdi Arabic (much of central Saudi Arabia) Omani Arabic Gulf Arabic (spoken around the coasts of the Persian Gulf in Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, as well as parts of Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, and Oman) Yemeni Arabic Levantine Arabic (spoken in the Levant region) Syrian Arabic Jordanian Arabic Lebanese Arabic Palestinian Arabic, Maghrebi Arabic (spoken in the Maghreb region) Algerian Arabic Libyan Arabic Moroccan Arabic Tunisian Arabic, Mesopotamian Arabic Baghdad Arabic, Egyptian Arabic, Sudanese Arabic, and many others. In addition, many speakers use Modern Standard Arabic in education and formal settings. Therefore, in Arabic-speaking communities, diglossia is frequent.