The proposed project sets out to examine how sociophonetic variation is acquired as part of L2 phonological acquisition in learners of French as a Foreign Language (FFL). Similar to first language (L1) learners, foreign or second language (L2) learners are continually exposed to sociophonetic variability in the acoustic input, since any stretch of speech contains information about the speaker’s regional and social background. However, despite the fact that linguistic and social information in the L2 input are inseparable, most research focusing on sociophonetic variation to date is skewed towards monolingual (English) contexts. As such, very little is known about (i) how L2 learners learn to perceive and consciously notice sociophonetic features of the L2 and (ii) to what extent they reproduce these features in their own speech during conversational interaction. This project will address these gaps in a series of four experiments, integrating understudied populations of learners of French as a Foreign Language (FFL). Theoretically, the project will afford unique insights into the role of (socio-)phonetic variation in L2 phonology; empirically, it will contribute to the body of research in the still emerging field of French sociophonetics. Methodologically, the project is innovative in taking a bottom-up approach in the identification of relevant sociophonetic features that places respondents at the center.