Communication Accomodation Theory

CAT

A friend went to Australia for two weeks and one of the things she brought back was a partial Aussie accent. We all sort of snickered at her and rolled our eyes for the first week or so, but after she persisted in calling us 'mate' and using 'crikey' as an expletive a month later, we eventually stopped inviting her out, until she just sort of drifted away. On the other hand, when my family was traveling through the South on vacation, people my age called my parents 'ma'am' and 'sir,' which was not the custom in our family. I tried it out and found it felt kind of good to be respectful to people I'd never met before. But when I got home and said, "Go ahead, ma'am" to a woman getting on the bus, she replied in affront, "Ma'am! What am I, your grandmother? Get on the d-mn bus." Embarrassed, I had to comply.

These are examples of people using communication to move toward or away from each other, in social groups they want to identify with or separate themselves from. People, including myself, have been using various strategies like these all my life, but it wasn't until I saw them through the lens of Communication Accommodation Theory that I realized how much these intentional or unconscious strategies revealed about speakers' motivations. Communication Accommodation Theory (CAT) includes all manner of communication including gesture; posture; diction (word choice), phonetic variation ('accent') and virtually a limitless possible series of utterances that can be included under the heading 'speech' or 'speech act' for convenience. Speech here refers to any attempt to communicate with a target, or 'interlocutor.' My self-proclaimed Australian friend was using her new, adopted, affected accent to separate herself from the rest of us here back home for some reason, which we all took to be her self-superiority because we had never been to Australia. On the other hand the woman who got mad at me for 'ma'am'-ing her on the bus used CAT to identify herself with me as younger than senior age, even when she was admonishing me in outrage. These examples illustrate the breadth of scope and intent various speakers employ CAT to accomplish, whether they know it or not.

Now that I have a formal theory through which to interpret this phenomenon, I realize how often this takes place around me, enough to be nearly ubiquitous. I see peers alter their speech styles when a professor walks into a class, and then see the same people use slang to act 'street' in front of other friends off campus. This has allowed me to realize that I am no different, which has a dual effect, allowing me to pay attention to my own communication from a clinical or detached standpoint in order to better control accommodation I want to continue or stop using, and this realization has also helped me stop judging others harshly the way we ostracized my friend for her affected accent. While hers was an exaggerated example and maybe deserved a little hazing for its condescending motivation, I see now that when peers use slang to come off as 'ghetto,' or refine their entire demeanor when interacting with a police officer outside the club on Friday night, these are only the more dramatic and thus noticeable extremes of a continuum that permeates perhaps all speech acts to some degree.

One practical application this allows is that CAT reveals more about the speaker's motivation than they may realize. This can be extremely useful, both in casual conversation and more formal situations, for example between worker and employer; when a peer is trying to fit in and wants encouragement; or when someone who seems to participate really sees them self as different from the rest of the group. This convergence, or identifying with others, or divergence, where the objective is to enhance distinctness for whatever reason, helps reinforce or reveal more information than carried by the literal word. One space this plays out in the absence, is in email. Anecdotal evidence from my own informal research suggests people often take emails as either too strict, or too informal, which I suspect arises from the absence of nonverbal cues we rely on to demonstrate irony; sarcasm; playfulness, or a host of other variations that do not come through in simple instructions like the kind often exchanged in text or electronic messaging. Nor do these media usually include the depth of context that allows readers to pick up such nonverbal cues from more traditional literature or visual media. The result is a kind of control mark by which we can measure the level of CAT that takes place face-to-face. While phone texting seems to be developing its own accommodation markers through the numerous abbreviations and emoticons that emerge ongoing, my own informal research group at least agrees that an email from a professor to "come see me in my office about your paper" does not encourage convergence even with a perfect grade point average, although there is no literal suggestion of divergence either.

This informal control benchmark indicates how complex forms of accommodation can become. When we hear a speaker with a regional dialect we cannot automatically tell if they are affecting an accent on purpose, or for example if they grew up somewhere else and have only partially assimilated to local norms. I have another friend who really did grow up in England, but moved to the U.S. In her late teens, but her speech has never entirely assimilated to our distinctive regional standard, with the result being an idiom all her own which listeners usually try to identify with unexpected results. On the other hand, were I to move to say Boston right now and attempt to adopt that distinctive accent, my success would probably be limited enough to indicate to natives that I was a transplant attempting to fit in unsuccessfully. This desire for social approval or convergence, if discovered, would lead to negative, rather than the positive response underlying the attempt. But when I use my textbook Spanish with the Latino family who runs the market in my neighborhood, they seem sincerely encouraging, correcting my pronunciation or offering new vocabulary, which, unless they are secretly tricking me into saying swear words or something really stupid, I can only take as genuine absent any controverting evidence. These various degrees of the overtness with which speakers employ accommodation in practice compared to the stiff convention of the typical email, indicates the wide degree of awareness, intent and appropriateness a theory of accommodation must explain.