Kloss recognized three degrees of separation between ausbau languages. When two standards are based on identical or near-identical dialects, he considered them as splits of the same standard into two or more, constituting a
pluricentric language. Examples include
British and
American Standard English,
Standard Austrian German and
German Standard German, or European and Brazilian variants of
Portuguese.
High Hindi and
Urdu also have a common dialect basis (
Hindustani). The same is the case with Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian and Montenegrin, which also have the same dialect basis (
Shtokavian), and
consequently constitute four standard variants of the
pluricentric Serbo-Croatian language. Standards created from different dialects, but with little
abstand, would not be considered separate abstand languages, but constitute distinct ausbau languages, as noted above for
Danish,
Swedish and
Norwegian. The concept of
ausbau is particularly important in cases where the local spoken varieties across a larger region form a dialect continuum. In such cases, the question of where the one language ends and the other starts is often a question more of
ausbau than of
abstand. In some instances,
ausbau languages have been created out of dialects for purposes of
nation-building. This applies, for instance, to
Luxembourgish vis-a-vis German (the vernaculars in Luxembourg are varieties of
Moselle Franconian, which is also spoken in the German sections of the
Moselle River valley and neighbouring French département of
Moselle). Other examples of groups of vernaculars lacking
abstand internally but that have given rise to multiple
ausbau languages are:
Persian of Iran, Afghanistan and Tajikistan (
cf. Farsi,
Dari,
Tajik);
Bulgarian and
Macedonian, because they have different dialect bases. Finally, the
ausbau languages may be so different that they also constitute
abstand languages. Examples include
Dutch versus
German,
Persian versus
Pashto, and
Tamil versus
Telugu. In the former two cases, scholars do not always agree on the best classification, as they always partake, inadvertently, in the "language making" and "language unmaking" process. The concept of a
One Standard German Axiom in that language is a case in point that illustrates the contested nature of the first two types of ausbau languages and occasionally also the third, varying with the degree with which sociolinguistic processes are assigned relevance in a particular approach. == Change of roles over time ==