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Abstract

This article aims to examine the causes, social contributing factors, and the linguistic consequences of Second Dialect Acquisition (SDA henceforth) in children in North America, drawing on relevant articles. For children growing up in a monolingual region but then must live in a new space, acquiring second dialect can pave them to improve their communication skills, adjust their social and identity belonging. Yet why, how, and the linguistic consequence of SDA require further studies. We used the thematic synthesis in reviewing the existing related literature based on three steps: article identification, selection, and analysis. Six causes of SDA were found: parents' displacement, children's contact with agents, length of contact, the weak language filter parents/family have for children, children's motivation, and family problems. Five social factors contributing to SDA were identified: the role of family, media exposure, teachers' roles, peer group interaction, and the linguistic marketplace. As SDA is not limited to North America but occurs worldwide, research on this topic can be extended to beyond English-speaking contexts. Such expansion can enrich the SDA paradigm by investigating the sociolinguistic settings of different languages and their speakers. Future studies also examine the psycholinguistic aspects of SDA to narrow the gaps in the literature, given that SDA involves both sociolinguistic and cognitive mechanism.

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