Acknowledgements

We owe our gratitude to the many people and organizations who have supported this work from its origins as a conference to the now published volume. To begin, we would like to thank the Graduate School Empirical and Applied Linguistics at the University of Münster for entrusting us with the responsibility of spearheading its graduate conference in 2019, and for all of its generous logistical and financial support to that end. The international conference, “Pluricentricity versus Pluriareality: Models, Varieties, Approaches”, was also made a success through the support of several professors, our fellow graduate students at the time, student volunteers, and many others, including: Gunter De Vogelaer, Dagmar Deuber, Christine Dimroth, Anika Gerfer, Christian Gewering, Ulrike Gut, Eva Hänsel, Ka Man (Darlene) Lau, Dejan Matic, Christina Nelson, Jan-Philipp Pflügl, Juliane Schopf, Muhammad Shakir, Katrin Thelen, and Mats Väisänen. We thank them all. We would further like to acknowledge funding we received from the International Office of the University of Münster.

We gratefully acknowledge all of our conference presenters who expertly addressed the knotty issues of variation in standards, and especially thank our plenary speakers for lively talks which impacted our thinking regarding this volume: Stefan Dollinger, Stephan Elspaß, Rudolf Muhr, and Edgar W. Schneider. To these plenary speakers and Sarah Buschfeld, who also helped us to sum-up the conference theme while spurring us to rethink the “versus” of its title in our final roundtable, we offer our enduring thanks for their insights and guidance.

When, in the early days after the conference, we decided to reach out to potential contributors with the idea for this book, we were met with enthusiasm by our present authors. Their commitment over the course of the intervening years — through the ups-and-downs of usual life, work pressures, and the uncertainties of a global pandemic — kept us grounded and inspired us to push through to the end. Needless to say, this book would not exist without them.

We acknowledge, too, the various ways in which John Benjamins and its “Studies in Language Variation” series editors have helped to shape and guide this work. Peter Auer, Frans Hinskens, and Paul Kerswill’s timely reviews, patience, and overall collegiality made it possible for us and our contributors to shape and refine this volume.

To Fahimah Ali, who came in at the last stretch to lend us her sharp eye for copyediting and referencing, we give our thanks and best wishes for her ongoing academic journey.

Finally, while these acknowledgments have foregrounded this book, the reality is that the volume really came together in the background of life. As such, we cannot thank our families and friends enough for the innumerable ways in which their care and support have given us the strength and space necessary to pull it all together. To them, we offer our highest esteem.