Author(s)

Rongjia Chen, Puisum Tsoi

Corresponding Author

Rongjia Chen

ABSTRACT

This paper reviews the relationship between non-standard language varieties and social identity theory under different contexts. The main arguments were raised from perspectives of both the first language (L1) learners and second language (L2) learners. We started out with a context of learning environment, which is the non-standard language of second language acquisition (SLA) speakers and social identity; then we continued with the contexts that are less focused on learning community, and more on the major phenomena in a social group with multiple ethnicities and immigrants, which lead to our second topic, the non-standard language varieties and sociolinguistic discrimination. The results of our analysis show that foreign accent is an important component of building up a sense of social belonging and social identity during the process of SLA learning, and the attitude of the native speakers of the target language towards different foreign accents impact the self-awareness of the learners. Our analysis also reveals that even within one language, variations exist among varieties, typically standard and non-standard, due to social factors in terms of economics, regions and ethnicities, which could lead to linguistic discriminations that put threat on some specific varieties and reduce the variety diversity. In addition, after careful review of relevant study, we observe that there are still blanks in the field that future researcher needs to fill in, for example, studies on network languages and some small languages with a small number of speakers.

KEYWORDS

Non-standard Languages, Foreign Accents, SLA, Linguistic Discriminations, Social Identity