Introduction

The investigation of language development over the past decades has mainly focused on monolingual development (e.g. Clark, 2004; Golinkoff et al., 1999), although bilingual development has gained ground over the last 20 years, with researchers studying different aspects of it, from lexical and phonological development to the effects of bilingualism on cognitive function (e.g. Pearson & Fernández, 1994; Werker & Byers-Heinlein, 2008). Lexical and morphosyntactic development are both quite well described and different aspects of them are now well understood in monolingual populations; researchers have been tracing similarities and differences from bilingual populations.

A grey area between the two extremes, monolingualism and bilingualism, has recently received much-needed attention (Grohmann, 2014; Grohmann & Kambanaros, 2016): discretely bilectal populations (Rowe & Grohmann, 2013), that is, speakers in linguistic communities traditionally characterized as diglossic, where more than one variety of the same language co-exist. One such case is Cyprus, where the local dialect, Cypriot Greek (CG), co-exists with the standard variety, Standard Modern Greek (SMG); however, this approach can arguably be extended to countries in which distinct dialects co-exist with a higher standard, such as Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Norway or Switzerland.

Recent research on the development of Greek in Cyprus suggests that CG-speaking children acquire morphosyntax differently from their monolingual SMG-speaking peers in mainland Greece (Grohmann, 2011; Grohmann & Leivada, 2012; Kambanaros et al., 2012). Also, Durrant et al. (2015) compared the phonological representations of familiar words between monoand bidialectal 18-month-olds in British English and found that only monodialectal children could detect phonological mispronunciations of words, suggesting that multidialectalism may impact the degree of specificity of one's phonological representations in early infancy. The question then is whether children who are exposed to more than one language variety (that is, standard form, dialect, etc.) grow up more akin to monolinguals or to bilinguals, or whether there could be a third, intermediate, option between monoand bilingualism with its own special characteristics (cf. Grohmann & Kambanaros, 2016; Kambanaros et al., 2014).