Second Language Acquisition and Sociolinguistic Variation

Abstract

Variation pervades the speech of second language learners. Vietnamese learners of English, for example, sometimes mark verbs for tense and sometimes fail to do so (Wolfram, 1985). Sometimes English speaking learners of French delete ne, while at other times they do not (Regan, 1996; Dewaele, 2004). However, despite the promise offered by early variationist studies of second language acquisition (SLA), until recent years relatively few SLA researchers availed themselves of the potential offered by the methodological and analytical tools developed in variationist sociolinguistics. This article outlines the recent contributions of variationist linguistics to SLA and suggests future research that may enhance our understanding both of SLA and of intercultural communication. The late 1960s and early 1970s witnessed the development of two subfields of linguistics: the quantitative study of linguistic variation pioneered by Labov (1966, 1969) and the systematic investigation of second language acquisition (SLA), exemplified by studies such as Cazden, Cancino, Rosansky, and Schumann (1975) and Hakuta (1976). These two

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