According to Griffin (2009, p.387), Giles who is a social psychologist claimed that when two people from different ethnic or cultural groups interact, they tend to accommodate each other in the way they speak in order to gain each other’s approval. He specifically focused on the non-verbal adjustments of speech rate, accent and pauses. He claimed that speech accommodation is a frequently used strategy to gain the appreciation of people from different groups and cultures. This process of seeking approval by meshing with another’s style of speaking is at the core of what he then labeled communication accommodation theory.
From my opinion, communication accommodation theory happens because that one person need to be liked by a group especially when he or she is new. A person can have multiple identities so they can adjust themselves whenever they mingle or interact with different groups with different cultures or you will end up being alone.
According to the ‘theories’ website, this theory states that when we talk with people we sometimes tend to change our style of speech and tend to modify it to match the one of the listener. This adaptation happens at the subconscious level. We tend to talk like the listener and modify our diction, rate, tone accordingly. Speakers would either adapt to the different culture or show their differences with the other culture is what both of these terms mean (Coupland, Coupland & Giles, 1991, p.25).
One example that I am going to use for the purpose of this analysis is about Ross, the character from “Friends’. In this scene, Ross deliberately fake his accent by talking in British accent. This happened when he was nervous on his first day of the teaching in the university. Before he entered the class, he actually had some deep research and thoughts on how to make the students to like him on his first day. However, he cannot think of anything. On the day itself, he actually had no idea what to do. When he started talking, he somehow changed his accent to British. Then, he had been using the fake accent for a period of time which had actually boost his confidence in teaching.
From my point view, people faking their accents really do happen in real life. Just like Ross, he did it because he was doing it unconsciously as he was very nervous on his first day of teaching. For him, British accent was more like a posh accent therefore he thought he would be more respected if people thought he was a British.
In other situations for other people, this might happen because people might want to be accepted in to a new group and to be more similar. People may feel awkward, ashamed or weird to be different or foreign in front of people with different culture and simply do not want to be left alone.
References :
Coupland, Coupland & Giles. (1991). Language, Society and the Elderly. Great Britain: Blackwell.
Griffin, E. (2009). A first look at communication theory. New York: The McGraw-Hill Companies
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