Sociolinguistic Variation and Second Language Acquisition: Insights from Advanced Learners of French

The study of a range of sociolinguistic variables in second language acquisition research has allowed a number of trends to be identified concerning the acquisition of sociolinguistic variation by the L2 learner. Based on quantitative analyses, this article considers such trends in relation to the variable use of the liaison in French interlanguage by a group of classroom learners in Ireland. Whilst use of the obligatory liaison poses less difficulty to the learners, findings point to the considerable acquisitional difficulty that use of the variable liaison poses: in a range of syntactic contexts, the learners greatly underuse the liaison which constitutes the formal variant of this variable. In so doing, the learners’ overuse of the informal variant, that is to say, non-use of the liaison, contrasts sharply with previous findings for other sociolinguistic variables where overuse of formal variants is seen to dominate in learner language. The results are discussed in relation to potential acquisitional and pedagogic reasons for such discrepancies in findings.