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

Example 7
June works in a travel agent’s in Cardiff, the capital city of Wales. She sees a wide range of people in the course of her job. Last Tuesday she saw an accountant, an old friend from school, a woman who works for the council as a cleaner, and a local schoolteacher.
As she spoke to each person she pronounced words like better and matter differently, depending on the way her customer pronounced those words.
Accommodation theory, also known as communication accommodation theory (CAT) or speech accommodation theory (SAT), aims to understand how and why we change our speech based on who we are talking to. The theory looks at the motivations behind accommodation in communication and the consequences.
When a junior employee in an organization is talking to a higher level employee, both the people tend to accommodate each other by realizing their differences in social status and rankings or positions. The junior tries to talk in a respectful manner and a pretense to know many things to accommodate the senior and the senior tries to make the junior comfortable by accepting the respect. The junior uses convergence process whereas the senior uses divergence process.
Features of Communication Accommodation Theory

• People tend to match the way they talk to the way listener talks.
• It can be conscious or unconscious.
• Accent, speed, vocabulary, cadence, gestures are some accommodations done.
• It is done to fit in a group or social status.
• It shows agreement, belonging and affinity.
• People only show their positive sides while communicating.
• There are other concepts like counter accommodation, under accommodation and over accommodation which affects the effects of communication accommodation theory.
• It can either be beneficial or unfavorable.
• It includes psychological, social and linguistic behavior of interactants.
• Some strategies used are approximation, interpersonal control,, interpretability, etc.
• It includes interpersonal, intrapersonal as well as intergroup factors affecting communication.

The main goal of the theory is to reveal the underlying motivations of why people adjust their speech and behavior to that of others. In order to do so, three strategies to accommodate an interaction partner were identified:

• Speech convergence



• Speech divergence

• Over-accommodation

Converging towards the speech of another person is usually considered a polite speech strategy. It implies that the addressee’s speech is acceptable and worth imitating. Using the same pronunciation and the same sort of vocabulary, for instance, is a way of signaling that you are on the same wavelength.