Brainstorming People generally accommodate due to the influence of social factors such as gender, culture, ethnicity, native language, social and occupational status, and age

Accommodation and audience design
Brainstorming
People generally accommodate due to the influence of social factors such as gender, culture, ethnicity, native language, social and occupational status, and age.
• Discuss with your partner how you might change your own speech when talking to someone older or considerably richer than yourself.
• Now think about how you would talk to someone with a different native language. Do you think your communication style would change?
Audience design
Audience design is the practice of shaping language to take a speaker's audience into account. This often requires speakers to shift their stylistic choices. As a sociolinguistic model, audience design was first proposed by Alan Bell in 1984.
Alan Bell theorized four basic types of audiences.

• First, there are audiences known as addressees, who are known to speakers and are addressed directly.
• Second, there are those Bell termed auditors; these listeners are not directly addressed, but are acknowledged by speakers.


• Overhearers ,on the other hand, are not addressed or acknowledged, but speakers are aware of them.
• Those in the final category are eavesdroppers, according to Bell; speakers are virtually unaware of listeners in this group

• These audiences were conceived as a result of research Bell conducted on radio stations in New Zealand.
• He compared two radio stations that shared a studio and some of the same presenters, but aimed their content at different listeners.
• Using this data, he examined the changes in broadcasters' language from one station to the other.
• The audience was the only variable in the experiment, so he was able to conclusively attribute changes in their styles to differences in audience.

Example 6
(a) Last week the British Prime Minister Mr David Cameron met the Australian Premier Ms Julia Gillard in Canberra . . . Their next meeting will not be for several months.
(b) Las’ week British Prime Minister David Cameron met Australian Premier Julia
Gillard in Canberra . . . Their nex’ meeding won’t be for sev’ral months
These utterances illustrate a number of linguistic features which distinguish the pronunciations of newsreaders on different radio stations.
In (b) there is simplification of consonant clusters, so [la:st] becomes [la:s] and [nekst] becomes [neks].
The pronunciation of [t] between vowels is voiced so it sounds like a [d]. Hence meeting sounds like meeding. The definite article the is omitted before the titles Prime Minister and Premier and the honorifics Mrs and Mr disappear. And finally, utterance (b) contracts will not to won’t.
A contrast between the newsreader on a middle-of-the-road station (ZB) with an audience from the lower end of the social spectrum, compared to the prestigious National Radio network (YA) with its older, generally better-heeled audience.

• This is strong support for the importance of audience design: the influence of the addressee or audience on a speaker’s style. The most convincing evidence comes from the behavior of the same newsreader on different radio stations.
• Where the stations share studios, a person may read the same news on two different stations during the same day.

In this situation, newsreaders produce consistently different styles for each audience. The news is the same and the context is identical except for one factor – the addressees. So the same person reading the news on the middle-level station reads in a very much less formal style than on the higher brow radio station.