L2 Journal

While the Multilingual Turn has critically shifted the field of Second Language Acquisition away from monolingual ideologies, it has often ignored the irreconcilability of the prescriptivist standard ideologies that devalue the diversity within named languages. This oversight perpetuates linguistic hierarchies, marginalizes non-standard variety speakers, and misrepresents the complex nature of real-world language use. The contributions to this special issue dismantle monocentric, native-speakerist, and prescriptivist standard language ideologies in second language education in order to explore the potentials of a multidialectal and multilingual approach. In so doing, they raise questions about social justice implications of dialect representation and erasure and showcase successful pedagogical applications of second language dialect instruction. By integrating multidialectal perspectives, this issue seeks to foster a more robust and inclusive Multilingual Turn that accurately reflects linguistic diversity both across and within languages, empowering learners to become adaptive users who can critically engage with and subvert power structures embedded in language variation. Collectively, these articles offer theoretical insights and practical implications for recognizing the vital role of within-language diversity in SLA.