Modelling Chinese as a pluricentric language

Chinese is a highly complex language with internal variation unprecedented in most other languages. Yet, that does not mean Chinese is unique in the sense that it cannot be compared to other languages and new concepts need to be introduced for the description of it. This paper is dedicated to the question of how to apply the notion of pluricentricity to the Chinese language whilst at the same time keeping Chinese comparable to other pluricentric languages. Attempts have been made to see Chinese through a pluricentric lens, yet they have not incorporated the entirety of Chinese with its various Fangyan or have introduced concepts that distort the discussion on Chinese from its linguistic reality. To ensure comparability across pluricentric languages, this paper acknowledges that the termChineseis an umbrella term that does not refer to any single Fangyan but that encompasses all of them. Hence, instead of Chinese, Fangyan are used as a point of departure for the application of pluricentricity. This paper proposes an inclusive framework of Chinese pluricentricity comprising 15 standard varieties: two Cantonese, three Hokkien and five Mandarin varieties as well as two varieties of the Chinese script and three varieties of Mandarin phonetisation systems.