Becoming biphonological: The acquisition of a second 'accent'

Abstract

The term ‘bidialectal’ is used in the academic—and to some extent popular—literature to refer to an individual’s command over two dialects (D1 and D2) of a given language (see Siegel, 2010). However, this term subsumes two broad categories of competence in said dialects, namely that of the phonology on the one hand, and of lexicon, morphology and idiomatic usage (‘lexicon’) on the other. Studies in Second Dialect Acquisition (SDA) are themselves few in number, and the few that exist do not always clearly distinguish between phonological and lexical acquisition. For instance, two of the earliest studies in the field (Labov, 1972; Wells, 1973) both deal with the acquisition of a second phonology, but do not refer to it as such, instead including it under ‘bidialectalism’. More recently, a well-known paper in the field (Tagliamonte & Molfenter, 2007) entitled “How’d you get that accent?: Acquiring a second dialect of the same language” actually deals with the acquisition of a second phonology, namely British English phonology by Canadian-English-speaking children. The term ‘dialect’ in the title therefore could be construed as indicative of a wider scope of study than the paper actually covers.