Accommodation theory

This theory was constructed by Howard Giles, and stated that we modify our language depending on who we are with, the events taking place and the overall context of the conversation.  He claimed that 'When people interact they adjust their speech, their vocal patterns and their gestures, to accommodate to others'. Giles' theorised that we have the ability to converge our language, meaning we accommodate our language to someone we are talking to, whether it be to enable the participant to understand them better, or to raise their social status. For instance, it is usually seen that adults converge their language when talking to children so that they can understand what is being said, this may be through the use of raised intonation or other features such as empty adjectives. However, Giles also stated that we can also diverge our language to distance ourselves away from who we are talking to. Perhaps we may diverge our language because we do not have a good relationship with someone or just simply do not want to communicate. An example of this could be with two rival football fans, they may both exaggerate their accents to distance themselves from each other and to eliminate any sort of bond. It can be said that throughout many parts of a usual day, we either converge or diverge our language. In fact, it is so substantial throughout our entire language use that we perhaps are unaware that we are even modifying it.

A recent example of accommodation theory is when George Osbourne visited and conducted a speech at Morrison's distribution warehouse in Kent, with presumably a large proportion of the audience being of the working class. What is perhaps interesting of Osbourne's speech is that he actually modified his language to appeal to this audience, with a foremost change being his accent. He pronounced the 'want to' as 'wanna' and 'we have had a' as 'we've ad a', which is a key example of convergence. This scenario is a key representation of how the accommodation theory functions. There are various reasons for us to accommodate our language; establish a friendship, act on positive face needs, to gain something, to boost social status.. There may be several techniques that we use to accommodate our language, such as; tag questions, hedges, following Grice's maxims. On the other hand, different features may be used to diverge our language. This could be the usage of; taboo language, dispreffered response, the flouting of maxims. Another aspect of accommodation theory can relate to overt and covert prestige, which is used famously by Labov and Trudgill. Overt prestige can be where someone uses an accent with connotations of a high social status, perhaps relating to RP. Whereas cover prestige is where someone may use an accent which is less known, therefore they may use it to diverge away from others, which is famously seen by the villagers in Labov's 'Martha's Vinyard' study.