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Accommodation has to be seen as a supposition in dialect contact scenarios. It refers to the linguistic changes on the individual level in short-term contact situations. In general, speakers tend to modify their speech towards or away from their interlocutor. This hypothesis is put forward by Giles and Powesland (1975 quoted in Trudgill 1986) in the communication accommodation theory. Their explanation for such behaviour is similar to positive politeness strategies found on the pragmatic level.

The essence of the theory of accommodation lies in the social psychological research on similarity-attraction. This work suggests that an individual can induce another to evaluate him more favourably by reducing dissimilarities between them. The process of speech accommodation operates on this principle as such may be a reflection of an individual’s desire for social approval (Giles and Powesland 1975: 157).

Studies have shown short-term accommodation of speakers towards the interlocutor. Coupland (1984) demonstrates in his study that a travel agent accommodates her speech towards her customers. Bell (1984) on the other hand analyses the accommodation of radio presenters to their invisible audience (an approach which is also called audience design). However, short-term accommodation and long-term accommodation have to be distinguished. Auer (2007: 109) restricts the impact of short-term accommodation when he states that “it cannot be taken for granted that the social psychological model which explains interpersonal accommodation can be expanded to explain long-term dialect accommodation as well.” Thus, he argues that while short-term accommodation is a non-permanent change, long-term accommodation might lead to changes that last and modify the original variety considerably.

Trudgill (1986: 24) claims that long-term accommodation follows a fixed route, i.e. speakers with a similar linguistic background acquire features of another linguistic background in a similar manner. He bases this assumption on data of English citizens acquiring American English features as a result of long-term accommodation. Trudgill ascribes an important role to salience in the accommodation process which he defines as “due to factors such as [...] stigmatization, linguistic change, phonetic distance and phonological contrast” (Trudgill 1986: 11). A predecessor to the concept of salience is Schirmunski’s (1928/29 and 1930 quoted in Schwarz, Spiekermann and Streck 2011) model of primary and secondary dialect features. Schirmunski argues that primary dialect features are more ostentatious than secondary dialect features which lead to the loss of the former ones in dialect contact situations (see Lenz 2010 for a historical overview on the notion of salience).

However, the concept of salience is highly debatable. Meyerhoff (2011) criticises the term salience as “a maddeningly under-defined term when used in sociolinguistics” and different approaches to define salience exist: Hickey (2000) provides a list of possible triggers for salience. He does however emphasise that none of these factors can be given more importance than others and that they can co-occur. His list of factors includes acoustic prominence, homophonic merger, system conformity, deletion and insertion, grammatical restructuring, openness of word class, the loss of vernacular features and retention of conditional realisations. Hickey (2000: 13) suggests that “the features involved are always strongly local and contrast with their lack in varieties which are less regionally bound, more ‘standard’ in the sense that they are not primarily indicative of a specific geographical area or of a social group.”

Kerswill and Williams (2002) introduce a model which takes salience into account as a possible factor in language change. Social factors as well as language-internal factors are important in their approach to explain salience, e.g. stark phonetic contrast. However, internal factors are only a prerequisite for features to become salient.

Auer, Barden and Grosskopf (1998) observe changes in the speech of individuals in a long-term dialect contact situation. They choose various factors mentioned by Schirmunski and Trudgill and divide them into subjective and objective aspects: articulatory distance, areal distribution, phonemicity, continuous vs. dichotomous structure, lexicalisation as objective criteria and code-switching, representation in writing and stereotyping as subjective criteria. They find that some of the categories are not at all applicable. One main finding is that salience cannot be reduced to single factors but rather is a complex process, e.g. salience does not seem to have an influence on strong accent features in their case study but only on features they classify as weak forms. Therefore, Auer, Barden and Grosskopf (1998: 184) come to the conclusion that “subjective and objective parameters in determining salience are therefore not mutually predictive.” Based on the results of the case study, Auer, Barden and Grosskopf (1998: 168) criticise Schirmunski’s (1928/29) as well as Trudgill’s (1986) concept in that salience in the two processes of levelling and diffusion are not seen separately.

Labov (1972a) categorises linguistic features according to their awareness in a community, i.e. indicators, markers and stereotypes. For example, in the sociolinguistic interviews Trudgill conducted in Norwich he notes that he adapted some linguistic features of some of the interviewees. While Trudgill (1986: 7-11) accommodates his use of T-glottaling to the interlocutor, his use of [aː] is fairly constant and does not conform to the use of this feature by the interlocutor. Trudgill suggests that T-glottaling must be what Labov defines as a marker while [aː] is rather an indicator in Norwich English. Linguistic indicators show only limited style shifting while markers are subject to it. The comparison of indicators and markers on an awareness level shows that speakers are usually not aware of variation of indicators while markers are sometimes commented on, and style shifting of markers points to awareness of the variation.

Accommodation has to be seen as umbrella term for two processes: Convergence seems to be the expected result of accommodation. However, linguistic divergence, though less well reported, is a possible outcome as well. Hickey (2000) suggests the concept of dissociation in opposition to accommodation:

The notion of dissociation is diametrically opposed to accommodation, the approximation of individuals to the speech of their interlocutors. The latter is taken to be – and have been – a powerful force in dialect differentiation as pointed out by sociolinguists repeatedly, above all by Peter Trudgill (Hickey 2000: 303).

Figure 2.1 and Figure 2.2 present the differences in concepts between the short-term social psychological model by Giles and Powesland and the dialect contact model by Hickey. Giles and Powesland's concept of accommodation is divided into convergence and divergence.1 For Hickey on the other hand, dialect contact situations are split up into accommodation and dissociation instances. However, linguists tend to use the terms divergence and dissociation synonymously, e.g. Watts (2005: 9).

Giles and Powesland (1975) promote a model where a short-term contact situation is the point of departure. The contact scenario leads to the socio-psychological process of accommodation which can take the form of convergence or divergence towards a speaker. Trudgill (1986) applies this model to short-term dialect contact scenarios and hypothesises that convergence and divergence are also the outcomes when two speakers of different dialects come in contact.

Figure 2.1: Accommodation as described by Giles and Powesland (1975; cited in Trudgill 1986)

Hickey (2000) on the other hand criticises the fact that the term accommodation only describes the process where speakers attune to their interlocutors but not the process where speakers distance themselves linguistically from their interlocutors. This process is also not very well recorded in linguistic studies; though there are instances of this behaviour observed in ethnographic studies, e.g. Jones (2012: 198, 200-203). In his model, Hickey (2000) describes accommodation as the positive outcome of a dialect contact situation, with dialect convergence and dissociation as the negative effect, i.e. dialect dissociation.

Figure 2.2: Accommodation process as described by Hickey (2000)

Both models can be justified. While Giles and Powesland (1975) focus on the social psychological side of accommodation, Hickey (2000) concentrates on the (long-term) linguistic outcome. However, an important point which has to be made is that while accommodation towards an interlocutor is foremost an unconscious process, dissociation or divergence in contact situations is very likely a conscious decision that a speaker makes. Yet this assumption needs to be tested. Researchers also have to trial whether accommodation has repercussions on long-term dialect contact outcomes.

Divergence patterns are widely recognised, i.e. young people in a speech community try to dissociate from older speakers, MC speakers dissociate from WC speakers and vice versa. For instance, Watt (2002) suggests that young speakers of Newcastle English do not want to be identified with the old “cloth cap and clogs” image of the city anymore and therefore turn to a more general Northern feature which he interprets as dialect levelling. In a similar vein, Hickey (2005) explains the recent changes in Dublin English. But not only is dissociation likely due to age but also due to social practice (cf. Moore 2010). Geographical dissociation is observable in the north-east of England, where Burbano-Elizondo (2006) and Llamas (2007) have shown that some groups do not want to be associated with Newcastle and therefore linguistically dissociate from its linguistic norms.