Accommodate Appropriately

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Another way to improve intercultural communication is to adapt your language and nonverbal behaviors, a process called accommodation. On a simple level, you do this when you squat down to get good eye contact and use basic vocabulary when talking to a child; 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 solidarity (Gallois, Franklyn-Stokes, Giles, & Coupland, 1988). Convergence usually results in positive reactions; if I behave like you, it is a way of saying “I am similar to you.”

Accommodation is not an absolute, all-ornothing goal: usually, it involves making small efforts to show that you respect others’ cultural and communication behaviors and that 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 días!”) or when thanking him for their meal (“Gracias!”).

However, it is important to be careful not to overaccommodate, which means to go too far changing your language or to change it based on an incorrect or a 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 down, increase volume, and use childish words) (Harwood, 2000). If his customers were to speak slowly and loudly or in mangled attempts to communicate in Spanish, Ramon might think they were making fun of him.