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This chapter examines pragmatic variation at the level of national varieties of pluricentric languages, i. e. languages with several interacting centers and norms of their own (Kloss 1978; Clyne 1992). In particular, key aspects of pragmatic variation are described as they occur across national varieties of languages such as Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, English, French, German, Spanish, and Swedish. An overview is given of relevant studies, specifying the varieties examined and contrasted (e. g. Peninsular Spanish and Mexican Spanish) and the phenomena analyzed and compared (e. g. speech acts, discourse markers, prosody). Methodological choices are also discussed, specifically data types and data collection instruments (e. g. role plays or corpus searches), and also methodological principles. The framework adopted in the type of work surveyed in this chapter is, as a rule, variational pragmatics, which is an approach concerned with pragmatic variation within a single language and focused on the impact of macrosocial factors on language use in (mostly spoken) interaction (for a recent summary of the field, cf. Schneider 2021). Region is one such macrosocial factor, along with age, gender and a few others. In this context, region has been theorized as a multifaceted concept pertaining to different dimensions in geographical space, among them the national, subnational, and local level. Region is, in other words, “an umbrella term for a hierarchy of spatial entities” (Schneider 2010: 248). To date, most research on regional pragmatic variation has, however, been carried out at the national level of pluricentric languages
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