L2 acquisition in a rich dialectal environment: Some methodological considerations when SLA meets dialectology

This chapter discusses how interlanguage variation and dialectal variation in the
target language appear homophonic in Norwegian. We demonstrate that this may
pose challenges for the interpretation of second-language data. In societies with
a high degree of variation in spoken vernaculars (or written norms),
second-language learners are likely to be exposed to a great deal of variation and possibly
conflicting features. The Norwegian language situation is a case in point: dialects
have a neutral or high status and most people speak their local dialect in a
variety of settings, both formal and informal. In this chapter, we review empirical
and theoretical studies on second-language acquisition, focusing on the
predictions they make for interlanguage variation. We then compare the findings of these
studies to spontaneous speech data obtained from The Nordic Dialect Corpus and
first-language studies of Norwegian. We demonstrate that it can be hard or
impossible to distinguish between targetlike dialect variation and nontargetlike
interlanguage variation. This has implications for the coding and interpretation of data.
Our investigation seeks to raise awareness of the methodological issues related to
differentiation between target-language variation and interlanguage variation and
to stimulate further discussion on the topic.