Accommodation Theory

Accommodative Moves

CAT first emerged as a consequence of observing people shifting their dialects—and bilingual speakers switching their languages—toward others they address on an everyday basis. Many times, these shifts, called convergences, come about so as to reduce significant social distances between the speakers. For example, speakers can shift their accents toward higher, as well as sometimes lower, prestige-sounding speakers, shifts called upward and downward convergence, respectively. In response, recipients might, or might not, reciprocate, thereby resulting in symmetrical or asymmetrical patterns. Although these shifts could be strategic and consciously performed, other times participants may not have been consciously aware that such convergent activities had even occurred.

The driving force behind these convergent adjustments was initially construed in positive reinforcement terms. In other words, increasing one's similarity with another's communicative style would promote mutual liking—which research in fact confirmed. In this vein, CAT proposed that the more you admire or wish to gain the respect of an influential person, the more likely you are to converge toward that individual, assuming you have the communicative repertoire to enable this. While an abundance of accommodative moves is good for greasing the wheels of interactional success, there can be limits to this. Hence, CAT addresses notions of optimal magnitudes and rates of convergence in that social costs could be incurred by completely converging toward the communicative style of another (e.g., deliberately mimicking them in a potentially patronizing manner), and also doing so too swiftly.

As this discussion would suggest, relative social power became integral to the theory in the sense [Page 2]that it was people of lower status who converged more to people of higher status than vice versa as people of higher status controlled more social capital. Similarly, the process of immigrant acculturation is, in large part, a communicative one: Immigrants converge to the dominant language of their new culture whereas members of the host community typically feel little need to accommodate the various subordinate ethnic groups around them. Indeed, near nativelike proficiency in the host language can often be one of the strongest symbols that immigrants have assimilated to the new culture's values, practices, and ideologies.

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