The German Language has official status at the national level in the F.R.G., G.D.R., Austria, Switzerland, Liechtenstein and Luxemburg; at a regional level in Italy (Alto Adige) and Belgium (the East), and in a even more restricted sense in a number of other countries (Namibia, Rumania, Hungary, U.S.S.R., Denmark). Only the F.R.G., G.D.R., Austria and Switzerland, however, possess undoubtedly their own standard varieties of German. Though it has been suggested, that other countries may have a few standard German peculiarities, e.g. Luxemburg (Luxemburgian German not Letzeburgisch! Cf. Clyne 1984:21-23), only for these four countries they have been generally acknowledged. Each of them possesses on the one hand an own linguisfic code of some sort, incomplete as it may be, i.e. prescriptive grammars or dictionaries which have an official status in the following sense: teachers (or other authorities) are authorised officially, e.g. by their educational (or public) administration, to correct the language behaviour of students (or other persons) on certain occasions, in accordance with the contents of these grammars or dictionaries. Such corrections or prescriptions are valid in a norm-theoretical sense, because of the authorisation from above (cf. Wright 1986, chapter 10; Ammon 1986). The codes not only contain standard variants in each case which are specific for the respective country (together of course with a much larger quantity of general standard German forms), but usually also mark them as such. Or they even comprise variants specific for the standard varieties of the other Germanspeaking countries, and mark them as such. (I use the term variant for single linguistic units and variety for entire systems.) While specific standard variants are undoubtedly established in this manner for the four countries mentioned (cf. however 2.2.) this is not the case for any of the other countries in which German has official status, e.g. Liechtenstein, Luxemburg or Belgium; they merely adopt, it would seem, the standard forms from one of the four larger German-speaking polities. It seems logical to call these various standards national varieties (cf. Clyne 1984:40; Clyne 1989) as it is common in other similar cases, e.g. with British, American and Australian English, or European and Quebecois French etc. In the case of the German-speaking countries this is, however, not unproblematic, since