This book is about learning a new dialect, and how it is different from learning a new language. In this introductory chapter, I start by describing the contexts where this kind of learning occurs and some of the questions the book aims to answer. As I have tried to make the content accessible not just to linguists, I have also included some basic information for readers without a strong background in linguistics. This is about differentiating dialects, describing speech sounds and studying variation in language. The final section presents a brief outline of the book. The study of second language acquisition (often abbreviated as SLA) examines how people who already speak a first language (L1) subsequently acquire a second or additional language (L2). This book focuses on a special type of SLA – when the relationship between the L1 and the L2 is close enough for them to be considered by their speakers to be varieties of the same language, or different dialects, rather than different languages. In this situation, the term "second dialect acquisition" (SDA) can be used. The study of SDA examines how people who already speak one dialect (D1) acquire a different dialect (D2) of what they or their community perceive to be the same language.

Referring to recent sociohistorical and comparative linguistic research on Hawai'i Creole, this article critically examines the four main tenets of Derek Bickerton's Language Bioprogram Hypothesis: (1) that creoles were created in one generation with only a rudimentary pidgin as input for first language acquisition; (2) that children had to go beyond the input to come up with a fully fledged language; (3) that widely distributed creole languages are virtually identical in particular linguistic features; and (4) that these features did not come from creole speakers' ancestral languages. The article concludes that creole languages do not provide evidence for innate specific linguistic knowledge; however, they are theoretically interesting in what they can reveal about language acquisition with diverse input.

More than 38,000 Chinese came to Australia to prospect for gold in the second half of the 19th century. Most of them originated from the Canton region of China (now Guangdong), where Chinese Pidgin English (CPE) was an important trading language. This article describes a recently discovered source that throws light on the nature of CPE used in Australia during that period - a 70 page notebook written in a form of English by a Chinese gold miner, Jong Ah Siug. The article presents some background information about Chinese immigrants in the region where Jong worked (Victoria), and evidence that some CPE was spoken there. It goes on to describe Jong's notebook and the circumstances that led to him writing it. The main part of the article examines the linguistic features of CPE and other pidgins that are present in the notebook, and discusses other lexical and morphosyntactic features of the text. Some features are typical only of CPE, such as the use of my as the first person pronoun. On the other hand, some features are more characteristic of Australian or Pacific pidgins - for example, the use of belong in possessive constructions. Still other features have not been recorded for any pidgin, such as the use of been as a locative copula. The analysis shows that Jong's text contains a mixture of features from CPE and other pidgins, as well as features of interlanguage, including some resulting from functional transfer from Jong's first language, Cantonese.

With over 1,000 indigenous languages and a recent history of colonial exploitation, the Pacific region has provided a fertile context for the growth of contact languages. This chapter first describes new languages (pidgins and creoles) and then new dialects (koines and indigenized varieties) that have emerged in the Pacific as the result of language contact. For the purpose of this chapter, the Pacific region is defined as including only small island countries and territories (thus excluding Australia, New Zealand, and the countries of Asia and the Americas that border the Pacific Ocean). Also, due to space limitations, the chapter concentrates only on lexicon and morphosyntax.