A pluricentric language or polycentric language is a language with several codified standard forms, often corresponding to different countries.[1][2][3][4] 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, and elsewhere; and French in France, Canada, and elsewhere.[5] The converse case is a monocentric language, which has only one formally standardized version. Examples include Japanese and Russian.[6] 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.[6]