Accommodation theory attempts to explain how people adjust the way they talk depending on who the audience is. Generally, there are two ways in which a person can adjust their speech. The two ways are convergence and divergence. In this post, we will look at these two ways of accommodating.
Speech Convergence
Converging is when you change the way you talk about sound more like the person you are talking to. This is seen as polite in many cultures and signals that you are accepting the person who is talking.
There are many different ways in which convergence can take place. The speaker may begin to use similar vocabulary. Another way is to imitate the pronunciation of the person you are talking to. Another common way os to translate technical jargon into simpler English.
Speech Divergence
Speech divergence is often seen as the opposite of speech convergence. Speech divergence is deliberately selecting a style of language different from the speaker. This often communicates dissatisfaction with the person you are speaking with. For example, most teenagers deliberately speak differently from their parents. This serves a role in their identifying with peers and to distances from their parents.
However, a slight divergence is expected of non-native speakers. Many people enjoy the accents of athletes and actresses. To have perfect control of two languages is at times seen negatively in some parts of the world.
A famous example of speech divergence is the speaking of former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan and his ‘Fedspeak.’ Fedspeak was used whenever Greenspan appears before Congress or made announcements about changing the Federal Reserve interest rate. The goal of this form of communication was to sound as divergent and incoherent as possible below is an example.
The members of the Board of Governors and the Reserve Bank presidents foresee an implicit strengthening of activity after the current rebalancing is over, although the central tendency of their individual forecasts for real GDP still shows a substantial slowdown, on balance, for the year as a whole.
Make little sense unless you have an MBA in finance. It sounds like he sees no change in the growth of the economy
The reason behind this mysterious form of communication was that people place a strong emphasis on whatever the Federal Reserve and Alan Greenspan said. This led to swings in the stock market. To prevent this, Greenspan diverged his language to make it as confusing as possible to avoid massive changes in the stock market
Conclusion
When communicating we can choose to adapt ourselves are deliberately diverge. Which choice we choose depends a great deal on the context that we find ourselves end
a dialect that is a blend of other dialects that have had direct contact with each other.
are presented in the following categories
post, we will look at the categories that these requests and responses commonly fall into.
life. In this post, we will look at how questions and responses are categorized in CA.
factors, social dimensions, and other characteristics.
official status in a country.
of communication. Social dimensions involve distance, status, formality, emotions, referential traits.
to. Many languages have different pronouns and even declensions in their verbs based on how well they know someone.
dealing with people who are not familiar with it. For example, when a mechanic speaks to a doctor about what is wrong with their car or when a medical doctor speaks to a patient about the patient’s health. The modification happens so that the other person can understand.
elevate themselves through their use of language. However, this conclusion has been refuted as women who work outside the home use more of the standard form of their language than women who work in their home.
to fluency in English. The students become exceedingly frustrated as they have to be reduced to such an elementary experience of drills and skits in order to be prepared for graduate studies. In order to achieve their dream, they must develop an identity in the English language.
acquiring the chunks or collocations of a language. Learning a language is not about rules but rather about acquiring enough examples from which the learner can make generalizations. For example, I child will eventually learn that “good morning” is a greeting for a specific time of day.
language should be broken down into its smallest units. For a structuralist, things like phonemes and morphemes are highly important because these are the smallest units of a certain language structures.
approach. This led to many teachers teaching language using a combination of 
This is another indication of the shift away from reading and writing.
perennialist worldview of education at the time. Learning a language is focused on grammar rules used in manipulating the meaning of the text.
a country. However, both of these terms are used for politic means in many countries.
and other transactions are reasons for the development of a pidgin. Pidgins are not used as a form of group identification but rather for practical communication.
determined by the function.
language. Speech involves the vocalizing of specific sounds called phonemes. Every language has specific phonemes that make of sounds for that language. For example, Spanish involves the rolling of the “r” often.