Second dialect acquisition (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Second dialect acquisition Lourdes Ortega Second dialect acquisition. By Jeff Siegel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Pp. 290. ISBN 9780521516877. $99 (Hb). In this book Jeff Siegel offers his vision for a new field of second dialect acquisition (SDA), devoted to the study of how people acquire an additional dialect (D2) of the same language they already speak from birth. The author is well known for his extensive work on pidgins, creoles, and unstandardized language varieties, particularly in the Asia-Pacific region; for his pursuit of second language acquisition (SLA) explanations for the genesis of creoles; and for his activism and publications on the education of speakers of marginalized language varieties. These staples of S’s past work resonate across all of the chapters here. Nevertheless, the book is distinctly original in broaching developmental questions rooted in individuals as the unit of analysis, a perspective that is qualitatively different from the well-established ontological perspective of the speech community in sociolinguistics and language contact research. In contrast, this book is squarely about the ontogeny of bidialectalism and the imperative to support it as a societal value and an individual language right. S sets a high goal for the new field of SDA by making its remit encompass the acquisition of any two related language varieties, including regional or ethnic dialects, creoles and pidgins, indigenized varieties and language-shift varieties, and varieties in diglossic contexts. For S the definitional criterion for deciding whether a case involves SDA is, over and above any linguistic adjudication of sameness or difference, that the two linguistic codes in question be ‘considered by their speakers to be varieties of the same language, or different dialects, rather than different languages’ (1). Given this speaker-centered definition, D2 acquirers’ perceptions of D1-D2 sameness and their awareness of D1-D2 differences become a recurrent leitmotif in the book. A formal distinction between naturalistic and classroom SDA is also central to S’s view of SDA. The former obtains in contexts where the dialect is picked up unintentionally from the environment ‘without any formal teaching’ (5), and the latter designates the very common case of ‘students enrolled in a course or an educational institution who want to, or are required to, learn a new dialect for a specific purpose’ (157) involving schooling, in most cases, and work, in more circumscribed settings. In fact, the nine chapters of the book are organized around the proposed context distinction. Chs. 2–5 are devoted to examining naturalistic D2 acquisition through evidence, gleaned from [End Page 215] sociolinguistic studies, that is reinterpreted by two guiding questions about the ontogeny of bidialectalism: How successful can the acquisition of D2 be? And what factors help explain variable (lack of) success? This examination is interspersed with comparisons of relevant counterpart theories, constructs, and findings in SLA, a theme that culminates in the middle of the book (Ch. 6) with a more formal examination of the similarities and differences between SLA and SDA. The last three chapters (Chs. 7–9) then offer readers a state-of-the-art characterization of classroom SDA, drawing on a wealth of educational linguistic and applied linguistic studies and designed to answer another question: Assuming bidialectalism is a societal value and an individual language right, what appropriate educational designs can best support it? This progression of chapters therefore embodies the implicit claim that the research priorities when investigating SDA will differ by context: issues of learnability and ultimate attainment will be of utmost interest in naturalistic SDA, whereas effective pedagogy and educational success will be at the forefront of research efforts to understand optimal classroom SDA. While the context distinction is important and the prioritization of research goals may be advantageous, another possibility worth exploring in the future might be whether additional explanatory power can be obtained in the new discipline of SDA by distinguishing and comparing the development of bidialectalism when it involves prestige versus stigmatized varieties (in both naturalistic and classroom contexts). One of the most important contributions of the book resides in the synthesis of past sociolinguistic research into naturalistic D2 acquisition offered in Ch. 2. S does not simply collate past findings but instead unearths cumulative...