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In: Rudolf Muhr (ed.) (2012): Non-dominant Varieties of pluricentric Languages. Getting the Pic- ture. In memory of Michael Clyne. Wien et. al., Peter Lang Verlag. p. 435-452. Aditi GHOSH (Calcutta University, India) aditi.gh@caluniv.ac.in Bhojpuri as a non-dominant variety of Hindi Abstract This paper seeks to explore the concept of pluricentricity and to see whether Hindi, a language with diverse and multiple mother tongues, can considered a pluricentric language. It specially looks into the case of Bhojpuri, which is one of the varieties classified under Hindi with a great number of speakers and which is spoken over a great stretch of land and analyses the language as a non-dominant variety of Hindi. Finally, it surveys a section of the migrated Bhojpuri community residing in Kol- kata and observes their patterns of languages usage and attitude, in an attempt to find out the relative position of the mother tongue in rela- tion to other dominant languages in the city. 1. Introduction The concept of pluricentric language provides a very useful and appropri- ate tool to analyse language varieties. Unlike the traditional standard vs. dialects framework, which dwells on deviation from the norm, it based on the question of separate norms. Besides, it can preserve the all-important question of hierarchy of language varieties, without carrying the issues of “correctness” or “purity” of the high prestige variety. Evidently, the concept has wide applicability in differ- ent language situations around the world. In this paper, I will try to explore the relevance of pluricentricity...