How and why do we adapt our language to ‘fit in’ with different social groups and classes?

How and why do we adapt our language to 'fit in' with different social groups and classes?

A language blog by Harry Judge

A lot of the time we change our speech to please or conform to 'social norms' it can often be seen as funny or stupid when someone blatantly  changes aspects of their speech to be more like the person they're talking to. For example a lower class person would change certain aspects of their speech when addressing someone of upper class; they would change their lexical choice (different choices of words) and would also change their pronunciation to be more like Standard English. One idea about why this occurs is that the person of lower social status (or higher status) wants to avoid the stigma of their social class.

A theory that highlights this hypothesis is Howard Giles' 'Accommodation Theory'. This theory was developed in the 1970's by Howard Giles and others. Giles' theory suggests that we adapt our speech to accommodate others when addressing them. This results in convergence (adapting your speech to move it closer to the person you're addressing) or less commonly divergence (adapting your speech to distance yourself from the person you're addressing)  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communication_accommodation_theory. An example of convergence occurs when a Policeman addresses the suspect:

Pol: O.K. Was Kelly, or the two persons in the car was; so there was four of youse in the car, I take it?

Sus: Four persons, yes. (http://grammar.about.com/od/ab/g/Accommodation.htm source by Richard Nordquist)

As you can see here the suspect is adapting their choice of words to match or 'accommodate' what the Policeman has previously said.

So I've covered how people adapt their language to 'fit in' with different social groups but the other important question is why. It is relatively unknown why we adapt our language to accommodate others; however by researching into the subject I gathered some information which could lead me to why we adapt language.

As mentioned earlier there is a social stigma related to the word choices and accent we use when we speak.  There is a significant relation between social class and the way we speak ( you wouldn't expect a resident of Kensington Gardens to frequently use the words 'blud' and 'fam' and speak with a strong Northern accent). Another way of changing our language is divergence. Divergence is often used to show superiority or power over the person you are addressing. An example of divergence I found on http://www.global-lingo.com/linguistic-convergence-and-divergence (by the company global lingo) was if an Anti-Royalist met with Prince Charles, he/she could distance him/herself from him by strengthening their dialect and speech patterns, so that the audible difference between the well spoken Prince Charles and themselves is more evident – making them seem worlds apart, and not able to cooperate. Another example of divergence is using overly simple language when conversing with foreigners. We tone down our accent and use simple lexis. We tend to omit other lexis we use daily such as FSL (Field Specific Lexis). We do the same thing with babies and children. Hopefully in this Blog I have covered everything you were curious about. Overall the methods and more importantly why we adapt our language still confuses me now.