This chapter discusses how interlanguage variation and dialectal variation in the target language appear homophonic in Norwegian. We demonstrate that this may pose challenges for the interpretation of second-language data. In societies with a high degree of variation in spoken vernaculars (or written norms), second-language learners are likely to be exposed to a great deal of variation and possibly conflicting features. The Norwegian language situation is a case in point: dialects have a neutral or high status and most people speak their local dialect in a variety of settings, both formal and informal. In this chapter, we review empirical and theoretical studies on second-language acquisition, focusing on the predictions they make for interlanguage variation. We then compare the findings of these studies to spontaneous speech data obtained from The Nordic Dialect Corpus and first-language studies of Norwegian. We demonstrate that it can be hard or impossible to distinguish between targetlike dialect variation and nontargetlike interlanguage variation. This has implications for the coding and interpretation of data. Our investigation seeks to raise awareness of the methodological issues related to differentiation between target-language variation and interlanguage variation and to stimulate further discussion on the topic.