Throughout its existence, Ukrainian has been a language of more than one state. At the time of the formation of its modern standard (nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries), the Ukrainian ethnic territory was divided between the Austrian and Russian empires, leading to the rise of two distinct varieties: eastern and western. Apart from different dialect bases, these two standards contrasted with respect to the type of interdialectal language variety immediately preceding them: folklore and urban koine, respectively. Despite the coexistence of two standards, Ukranian was not a bi- or pluri-centric language strictu sensu, as its development was characterized by a good deal of acentricity. Cross-border cooperation and periodical border shifts contributed to partial levelling of differences, especially during the interwar years, when contacts between the two traditional varieties were intensified in all of the countries (partly) inhabited by Ukrainians: the Soviet Union, Poland, Romania and Czechoslovakia. The corpus-planning centres for Ukrainian in each country were of different types (powerful, weak, dictatorial). After the reunification of the bulk of Ukrainian lands within the Soviet Union (1945) and following the proclamation of the country’s independence (1991), homogeneity of the standard was achieved, although ancient state boundaries continue to be felt.

The rise of standard forms of language for both the English- and the Spanish-speaking worlds is a development which benefits from contrast. Both languages spread overseas, with national standards arising during the later colonial period through a process of supraregionalization by which local varieties lost strong vernacular features and came to function as non-stigmatized, publically accepted varieties. However, the details of these developments are different and the cultural attitudes to varieties spoken in the source countries in Europe vary considerably, determining the ways in which standards are viewed and used in both the Anglophone and the Hispanophone worlds.

This chapter tackles several interrelated issues around the Kurdish language. It provides a general internal classification of Kurdish varieties, proposing also a theoretically informed distinction between language history and collective identity perceptions of speakers to resolve the classification disputes around Zazaki and Gorani varieties. ‘Kurdish’ in this sense is considered more a sociolinguistic unit than a purely linguistic entity. The chapter then provides summary discussion of the position of Iranian philology on the history of Kurdish, whereby it is shown that Kurdish is not in a direct descendant relationship with any of the known languages of the Old and Middle Iranian periods. The chapter traces the history of written and literary Kurmanji Kurdish. The rise of literary or written code in Kurmanji is shown to have taken place in late sixteenth century within the wider sociopolitical context of, on one hand, the emergence of powerful Kurdish principalities and widespread madrasa education, and, on the other hand, a general trend in the vernacularization of local community languages in Kurdistan. Finally, the development of modern Kurmanji as a polycentric variety is discussed and the current approximation of written norms are projected to merge in a more comprehensive plurinormative Kurmanji standard.

This chapter outlines the development of English dictionaries in Canada as expressions of the national variety of Canadian English. Four stages of dictionary development in Canadian English are identified. The role of and dependency on publishing houses in the field's development is surveyed. This dependency led, ultimately, to what is called the Great Canadian Dictionary War. A handful of less widely known dictionaries that were important in Canada’s lexicographical development are discussed in some detail, and numerical methods are used to analyse developments within the Canadian dictionary market since the late 1970s.