ABSTRACT
The term accommodation is used in two different ways in sociolinguistics. On the one hand, it refers to interpersonal accommodation, i.e. the convergence of two or more interactants’ way of speaking within an interactional episode. Models for the analysis of interpersonal convergence (or divergence) have their sources in social psychology, particularly in the work of Howard Giles (such as Giles 1973). It is a matter of debate whether this type of accommodation, which is temporary and has as its domain a bounded interactional encounter, can lead to language change on the community level (see Auer and Hinskens 2005 for a discussion). I will not be concerned with this meaning of ‘accommodation’ here. The second way in which the term is used refers to what is sometimes called long-term dialect accommodation, the convergence which may occur in (groups of) speakers who change their place of living more or less permanently within the same language area. This type of ‘internal’ migration and the subsequent dialect contact between the brought-along variety and the one spoken in the receiving area can lead to a durable change in speech habits of the immigrant group.
