Rethinking the AusbauAbstand dichotomy

into a continuous and multivariate system

JOSHUA A. FISHMAN

Abstract
There are several advantages to reconceptualizing Heinz Klosss dichotomy
Ausbau vs. Abstand as separate continuous variables, only the former of
which (Ausbau) is needed for corpus planning studies. Such a reconceptualization would not only be preferable from the point of view of measuring
the connectedness between degree of Ausbauization and various population
attitudes and academy implementation successes, but also to furthering continuous variable measurement in general sociolinguistics and to appreciating the co-presence possibilities of various other measures of corpus planning eorts that have most recently been introduced. One of the greatest
gifts of Heinz Kloss to macro-sociolinguistics was the formulation of a polar opposite distinction between any two contrasted languages or varieties
such that they are each either (a) easily recognized (i.e., judged) to be
functionally independent from one another due to the major and natural
(that is, not man-made) dierences have already transpired between them,
referred to as being independent by Abstand, on the one hand, or (b)
those whose functional independence is recognized only as a result of the
human eort that has been expended in order to make them appear suciently dierent from one another, so that the smaller and weaker of the
two can be recognized as independent from the larger and stronger one
and, therefore, referred to as being independent by Ausbau. Thus, the
major theoretical contribution of Kloss, initially made well before his Nazi
days (see Hutton 1999) was essentially a tripartite one,1 one which was simultaneously (1) judgmental and perspectival, (2) focused upon the importance of organized human intervention into the natural language-change
processes in order that prestige- and power-related societal functions for,
as well as the independence of, the contextually weaker variety were to
have a chance of being recognized at all, and (3) preoccupied with dialect
avoidance eorts more generally as a major desideratum governing intervarietal comparisons in the realm of social power. The above-mentioned tri01652516/08/01910017
6 Walter de Gruyter

Intl. J. Soc. Lang. 191 (2008), pp. 1726

DOI 10.1515/IJSL.2008.022

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J. A. Fishman

partite considerations may be highly interrelated but they are, nevertheless,

suciently independent from one another to also be considered separately,
rather than necessarily only jointly. Finally, Ausbau and Abstand, rather
than being totally separate, are also independently related to various yet
other language planning dimensions and it is these last-mentioned relationships that actually disclose the major importance of Ausbau to the entire
language planning venture in various polities (Schiman 1996; Kalogjera
1985).

1.

What is the opposite of Ausbau?

One of the conceptual characteristics of dichotomies is that both of their

alternatives must be on the same dimension. However, rightly conceived,
Ausbau and Abstand are not really on one and the same dimension. If Ausbau signies building away eorts in corpus planning (or as I once tentatively renamed them: the concern for fostering dissimilarity-focused
interventions in corpus planning) and if such eorts are conceptualized
as being located at one end of a dimension, than the truly opposite end
of that same dimension should by rights be termed Einbau, the concern
for fostering similarity-focused emphases, instead of Klosss proposed
Abstand. Indeed, the latter term, Abstand, is entirely unneeded in any language planning typology because it lacks any reference to human agency.
While the building (-bau) emphasis that we are accustomed to expect at one end of a human-engineered distancing dimension is needed,
indeed, it manifests itself in many dierent ways (see below), but Abstand per se is not one of them. As the two morphs of its German name
(ab-/stand ) imply, its rightful meaning is merely state or condition of
separation and neither the directional, nor the authoritative human
agency, nor the amount or degree of distancing that are matters of supreme concern for language planning are at all properly identied by the
term. Abstand merely connotes easily and often already recognized distancing between two varieties and, therefore, actually not a distancing
that needs to be fostered by language planning eorts. Perhaps our own
relatively poor German and the masterful reputation of Kloss, both as a
typologist (with a particular fondness for dichotomies) and as a Germanist, have long misled us into not recognizing the logical inconsistency into
which he misled us by stressing both Ausbau and Abstand as if they were
two equally prominent and legitimately opposite ends of one and the
same dimension.

Rethinking the AusbauAbstand dichotomy

2.

19

The usefulness and the quantiability of dichotomous categories

As our experience with societal data grows and develops (i.e., with the
data of societal behavior through and toward language/languages or,
more generally, variety/varieties), the more researchers will recognize the
inherent problems surrounding true dichotomies. If these problems are
not consensually solved by the investigators themselves, there is always
the possibility of conscious or unconscious errors of grouping. Dichotomies are rarely natural or true in nature and the more we examine
those few that have withstood the stresses of time the more we recognize
that even these few constitute vis-a`-vis more precise data of the world per
se that. If male/female can be further analyzable into degrees of
maleness and degrees of femaleness (as certain psychological tests currently claim and demonstrate), then certainly this is equally true with respect to degrees of ausbauness and degrees of inbauness. In principle,
we should be able to entertain the question of whether a certain Flemish
text and a contrasted Nederlands text are closer together or further apart
than another or than a certain Nynorsk text and a Bokmaal text that we
may want to compare to them.
This is certainly a dierent kind of question (and a far more dicult
one) than we could previously have entertained using the Klossian (or
Klossian-type) designations of whether Ausbau or Einbau were present in
either of the above cases. Furthermore, using these designations as continuous measures also alerts us to their essential combinability pertaining
to any particular text, rather than only to their inherent opposition. There
is no good reason why any particular passage cannot reveal both certain
Ausbau and certain Einbau characteristics. Even if this were not possible
for any particular subset of the same few words (a possibility that we will
need to leave for later), it is eminently possible for successive clauses, not
to mention sentences. Although whole variety characterizations may
still be operative for folk-linguistic or popular political purposes, they
are certainly not the only ones that are permitted to exist (that is, they
are not necessary restrictions that must obtain even for research purposes)
and this represents a welcome expansion of opportunity for the textual
microanalyst in sociolinguistics. Such expansion would be inherently similar in type to questions being pursued in connection with authorship and
provenance of texts (Is it likely that the same author wrote both of these
two texts? is a question not unlike Is it likely that both of these excerpts
stem from the same variety or Ur-text?).

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J. A. Fishman

3.

Can opposite directions in language planning be implemented on the

very same dimension?

As is evident in much other human behavior, so also sociolinguistic behavior reveals the co-presence of opposite or opposing tendencies within
the same text or within the same variety. This is even more so (although
by no means inevitably so) when we combine both attitudinal and linguistic data. Advocates of the opposition to New High Germanisms within
the Yiddish fold (among the Avek fun daytsh Yiddishists such as M.
Weinreich 1980 [1973] and M. Schaechter 1986) will still permit themselves and others to utilize the greeting a freylekhn shabes a happy Sabbath, although its rst component may be questionable because it is recognizably of German origin. Yiddish ausbauists who would cringe at
geburtstog (favoring, instead, the more home-grown geboyrn-tog) usually
see nothing at all objectionable about a freylekhn shabes. The same is
true of Swiss-German ausbauists who eschew Germanisms in their Romansh when confronted with multi-componential expressions such as
Merci viel mal. Foreign-markedness is not all of one piece of cloth; some
swatches of taboo-origin clear through the self-imposed censorship of
the standard language border regulators much more easily and quickly
than do others. Ultimately, any policy must be implemented at the microlevel and not just at the macro-level, as Klossians want to do.
However, some combination of possible opposites is even more germane to any discussion of Ausbauization when it is reviewed at a more
macro-level, although the implications and consequences of such combinations may well be recognizable at many low levels as well. At the
more macro-levels, the speech communitys awareness of the functional
dierentiation of language varieties is usually present at a more conscious
level. Varieties in contact often have separate names and this builds collective consciousness about them and their functionally proper or more
appropriate use(s). Nevertheless, notwithstanding the eorts of teachers,
editors, proof-readers, and other gatekeepers and name-givers, it is in the
nature of diglossic arrangements to display more or less leakage and
the functional border area(s) between the varieties in contact are the ones
most commonly aected thereby. In a period of social tension and social
stress, should a folksy letter between relatives, both of whom moved from
a common rural to separate urban areas decades ago, and who now almost never interact face-to-face but who used to always do so in Landsmaal when they were youngsters, now be in Landsmaal or in Ryksmaal,
and if in Landsmaal, should it now be in the variety orthographically
most distant from Ryksmaal or in a more proximate one? There are all
kinds of written Landsmaal (or Ryksmaal) still in use and the exact ones

Rethinking the AusbauAbstand dichotomy

21

to use between two individuals are often inuenced by social variables,

including education, income, and socially patterned and interpreted individual intentions. Thus, Ausbauization becomes a sliding scale that each
individual may try to adjust, upwards or downwards, both in individual
and societally meaningful (and meaningfully interpreted) ways. Being
matters of degree, they can also be regarded as indicative of degrees of
social acceptance between two interlocutors. However, matters of degree
are manifestly unrecognized (or under-recognized) if measured only via
dichotomies and can come into their own only when continuous measurement is employed.

4.

Internal and external boundary setting

Where to draw the line between Ausbau and Einbau eorts may be no
easier than drawing the line between any two other varieties that are on
a cline. If and when such lines succeed in being generally accepted for
decades or centuries, then they may seem valid enough to most of those
involved in upholding them. The line between Asturian and Castillian
is a very delicate matter, but it seems clearer and realer to many
viewers now than it did until quite recently (Moreno-Fernandez 2007)
and, as expected, this is done partially along self-interest lines, as is often
the case when continua must be replaced by rigid boundedness. However,
now that Madrid has recognized the co-ocial nature of Asturian (2007),
the recognizability of the boundary between them (Castillian and Asturian) may take on somewhat greater clarity (not to say urgency) to larger
numbers of interlocutors, just as the usage line between Valencian and
Catalan may have faded somewhat due to recent authoritative announcements that they are both merely dialects of the same Catalan
language. This would lead us to expect that Ausbau eorts between the
two will diminish in number and intensity from the Asturian side, just as
Einbau circumstances and eorts between them may come to predominate, at least in certain functions and in certain speech networks on the
Castillian side.
The recognition and accentuation of Ausbauization is also a factor that
operates in the coming into being of new languages, although it has not
yet received its due in that connection. The birth and death of languages may go a long way toward explaining why more languages
seem to be dying than ever before, at the same time that more languages
than ever before are constantly being added to the language lists maintained by SIL and other gatekeepers to language status. The very fact
that entire families of languages have achieved literacy at roughly the

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J. A. Fishman

same time (Fishman forthcoming) gives testimony to the fact that literacy
may also be an areal phenomenon that spreads and has already long
spread by interactional contagion (via religious, economic, and political
bacilli). The latter may well have been fostered by Ausbau attitudes and
sentiments that have marched across Europe, from West to East, from
the fourteenth to the eighteenth and even into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Einbauization has been a much rarer phenomenon in Europe, noted only in the Flemish/Netherlandish case with respect to literacy, the Landsmaal/Ryksmaal case (via the requirement that all new
words in either be introduced as Sammorsk), and in the Moldavian/
Rumanian case, but may yet have greater appeal on other continents
(particularly in Africa and Latin America) where the extension of literacy
and ocialization to more indigenous languages has only recently begun
to gather steam and may encourage the amalgamation of smaller entities.
Ultimately, some of the latter may need to institute self-saving Einbauization toward some of their own more minor varieties. Thus, Einbauization
versus Ausbauization are by no means steady states, xed forever and a
day, but, rather, distinctions between varieties that can be in fairly constant tension as sociocultural change rises and falls in conjunction with
turbulence within and between their speech communities. That being
said, the spread of English and of Islam (and, subsequently, of spoken
Mandarin within the Sinosphere) will probably serve to make for more
structural and functional similarities across hitherto dissimilar languages
than Englishes alone would have done. The permissiveness of the English error (i.e., the development of non-native written Englishes) not
only encourages minority-language continuity, but new variety birth and
stabilization as well.

5.

Ausbauization and diglossia

Since I myself have been responsible for a good bit of the constant discussion concerning the role of diglossia in connection with the stabilization
(or the destabilization) of the entire system of language-use balances and
boundaries that are intricately involved in Ausbau/Einbau distinctions, a
few words might well be pardoned here about diglossia in connection
with them. Ausbauization sometimes grows into and fosters a diglossic arrangement between the varieties that are involved. This arrangement is
very likely to come into being whenever the two varieties have co-existed
within the same speech community for centuries, whether they are now
considered related languages or not. If we add a stress on functional specialization to the expected stresses on structural distancing that has gone

Rethinking the AusbauAbstand dichotomy

23

on over many years (particularly vis-a`-vis literacy and other statusful pursuits in the religion and power domains of the culture), then we have accounted for the major dierentia that can and do often make for diglossia. When both Ausbauization and diglossia co-exist, the latter is bound
to be the older of the two since it requires a longer historical co-presence
between its constituents, a characteristic that structural distancing both
intensies and is fostered by in turn. Thus, Ausbauization neither requires
nor fosters diglossia, but diglossia requires and fosters both and does so
over a considerable length of time. Both are found to obtain rst among
higher social circles and more prestigeful text-proximate pursuits and actors. As a result, the U (upper) variety may have little if any inuence on
the more informal varieties of speech and the speech networks restricted
to them. This may very well indicate that we can look forward to the future continuumization of diglossia, as ever larger proportions of societies
the world over become literate. This will not necessarily spell the end either of diglossia or of Ausbauization, but will more denitely make either
one harder to attain or maintain.

6.

Other polarities involved in the total language planning process

Ausbauization and Einbauization are opposite poles (A and Ei) on the

structural distancing dimension within the total status and corpus planning enterprise. As Figure 1 reveals, there are other distancing dimensions
as well, some of a more specic nature and others of a more general kind.
Ausbauization (along the dimension parallel to the base line) marks, as
we have seen, attempts to escape from perceived excessive structural
similarity that makes the weaker party appear to be merely a dialect for
those who do not know its true merits, which are already known to
language activist insiders. A slightly dierent concern preoccupies those
that pursue Uniqueness (U maximal distancing from any and all
other languages that, nevertheless, retains its structural harmony with
previous word formation traditions), a route which led Estonian to an
ex nihilo method of creating new words out of nonsense syllables during
the 1920s, a view that necessarily distanced Estonian from Finnish and
the other members of the Finno-Ugric family of languages. Most practitioners of Purity (Pu) planning, however, are less traumatized by any
and all similarities to other varieties than they are by historically acknowledged borrowings from those languages/varieties that they have
long struggled with, e.g., as French has with English or (in former centuries) with German. Finally, we must also mention Classicization (C),
a retreat into a genuine (or, in the cases of Pannication (Pa), into a

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J. A. Fishman

Dimensions: A(usbau)E(inbau); U(niqueness)Westernization; P(urication)

V(ernacularization); C(lassicization)P(annication). Poles in italics are
distancing.
Figure 1. Visual portrayal of one members views of the proper goals of the language planning agency for language X (from Fishman 2006: 115)

mythic) great tradition, such as will cause other related languages/

varieties to envy and to dream about those who have had the good luck
to have been tempted by the siren songs of Illyria, of Malphilindo, or of
Dravidistan, or of other similar mirages. A classic past that the whole
world admires and treasures is too much of a prize for a small or now relatively forgotten people to give up, even though it may pose endless problems and extra burdens for those who elect it is as their path to modernization via language planning. The simultaneous application of all eight
dimensions (including both distancing and approximation) is uncommon
but not impossible in accord with the model illustrated here.

7.

Closing observations

When viewed as but one member of a club of alternative language planning routes to modernization via withdrawal or distancing, it becomes
easier to recognize Ausbauization as a continuum (a solution of degree)
rather than as part of a dichotomy, such as Klosss model originally suggested. Ausbauization may be furthered via purication eorts, or via
uniqueness eorts or via classicization eorts, all of which provide distancing with a specic direction, avor, and historical justication. After
all, distancing must have a rationale, rather than being considered as
providing its own automatic choices among alternatives. The latter

Rethinking the AusbauAbstand dichotomy

25

choices are derived from the fears, grievances, deprivations, insults, and
injuries that are the normal lot in life of all small and late-modernizing
languages that are widely viewed as being excessively and suspiciously
structurally similar to their larger and more powerful neighbors. In modern times, this has been the disease for which language planning (and
even linguistics more generally) has been called upon to devise therapeutic approaches. The need for converting dichotomies into continua, for
combining approaches that aim in disparate or in roughly similar directions, for coping with the combinability of and reversibility of human motives, and for a greater mastery of quantitative methods among researchers should make the future of corpus planning research (and of language
planning practice) considerably dierent and, hopefully, more eective, in
the future than it has been in the past. The continuumization of the traditionally dichotomous Ausbau-related dimension will also render Ausbauization more relevant to other major sociolinguistic topics from which it
has thus far been unnecessarily separated (e.g., language birth, language
death, language change, language policy, language politics, language distance, etc., all have already been conceptualized as continua in earlier
years).
Stanford University

Notes
1. Heinz Kloss went to considerable pains, several times, to convince me and Uriel Weinreich that he had never been a member of or sympathizer with the Nazi party. Even his
admitted membership in the German armed forces during World War II was purportedly as an ambulance driver and even that was involuntary. Huttons more recent revelations (1999) conrm those of a number of other post-War scholars concerning the politicized views and self-serving eorts of various German language specialists during the
years of Nazi rule. Kloss was, in many ways, a very ne scholar and his case is instructive for sociolinguists even today. More than most other language scholars, we run the
risk of being co-opted by dominant ideologies that may be able to facilitate our careers
and research eorts. I am not at all sure how many of us could resist such temptation;
obviously Kloss could not.

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