A pluricentric language or polycentric language is a language with several 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 the People's Republic of China, Taiwan and Singapore; English in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, South Africa, India, Singapore, and elsewhere; and French in France, Canada, many African countries, 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 to appear as separate languages, e.g. Malaysian and Indonesian, Hindi and Urdu, while Serbo-Croatian is in an earlier stage of that process.

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:

In addition, many speakers use Modern Standard Arabic in education and formal settings. Therefore, in Arabic-speaking communities, diglossia is frequent.

The Armenian language is a pluricentric language with two standard varieties, Eastern Armenian and Western Armenian, which have developed as separate literary languages since the eighteenth century. Prior to this, almost all Armenian literature was written in Classical Armenian, which is now solely used as a liturgical language.^{[citation needed]}

Eastern and Western Armenian can also refer to the two major dialectal blocks into which the various non-standard dialects of Armenian are categorized. Eastern Armenian is the official language of the Republic of Armenia. It is also spoken, with dialectal variations, by Iranian Armenians, Armenians in Karabakh (see Karabakh dialect), and in the Armenian diaspora, especially in the former Soviet Union (Russia, Georgia, Ukraine). Western Armenian is spoken mainly in the Armenian diaspora, especially in the Middle East, France, the US, and Canada.^{[citation needed]}

Additionally, Armenian is written in two standard orthographies: classical and reformed Armenian orthography. The former is used by practically all speakers of Western Armenian and by Armenians in Iran, while the latter, which was developed in Soviet Armenia in the 20th century, is used in Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh.^{[citation needed]}

In the modern era, Catalan is a pluricentric language with differences primarily in pronunciation and vocabulary. This language is internationally known as Catalan, as in Ethnologue. This is also the most commonly used name in Catalonia, but also in Andorra and the Balearic Islands, probably due to the prestige of the Central Catalan dialect spoken in and around Barcelona.^{[citation needed]} However, in the Valencian Community, the official name of this language is Valencian. One reason for this is political (see Serbo-Croatian for a similar situation), but this variant does have its own literary tradition that dates back to the Reconquista.^{[citation needed]}