Another way to improve intercultural communication is to adapt your language and nonverbal behaviors. Recall from Chapter 3 that adjusting your language and style of speaking toward the people with whom you are communicating is a process called accommodation. On a simple level, you do this when you talk to a child, squatting down to get eye contact and using a basic vocabulary; police officers also do this when they adopt the street slang or foreign phrases commonly used in the neighborhoods they patrol. When speakers shift their language or nonverbal behaviors toward each other’s way of communicating, they are engaging in convergence. We typically converge to gain approval from others and to show a shared group identity (Gallois, Franklyn-Stokes, Giles, & Coupland, 1988). Convergence usually results in positive reactions, because if I speak like you, it is a way of saying “I am one of you.”

Accommodation is not an absolute, all-or-nothing goal: usually, it involves making small efforts to show that you respect others’ cultural and communication behaviors, and you appreciate their efforts to communicate with you. Ramon makes efforts to speak English when he greets his customers at the restaurant where he works, even though it is not his native language and he struggles with it at times. Conversely, many of his regular customers who do not speak Spanish will greet him with the Spanish words they do know (“¡Hola, Ramon! ¡Buenos dias!”) and thank him for their meal (“¡Gracias!”).

However, it is important to be careful not to overaccommodate, which means going too far in changing your language or changing your language based on an incorrect or stereotypical notion of another group (Harwood & Giles, 2005). For example, senior citizens often find it patronizing and insulting when younger people speak “down” to them (slow speech, increase volume, and use childish words) (Harwood, 2000). For Ramon, if his customers were to speak slowly and loudly, or in poorly mangled attempts to communicate in Spanish, Ramon might think they were making fun of him.