ABSTRACT
Linguistic accommodation, the way speakers modify their language to adapt it to their interlocutors, is an activity in which all individuals engage regardless of the varieties or languages they use. "Each one of us will have experienced 'accommodating' verbally and non-verbally to others, in the general sense of adjusting our communication actions relative to those of our conversation partners, and been aware of others accommodating (or failing to accommodate) to us" (Giles & Coupland 1991:60). This process can manifest itself in a multitude of forms. Speaking louder to foreigners or to the blind, codeswitching into another language or variety, and "baby talking" to older people are a few well-known examples illustrating this phenomenon. Despite its apparently harmless intentions this phenomenon has been found to reflect existing sociopolitical relations in interpersonal and intergroup encounters across, age, gender, class, and ethnic lines (e.g., Coupland et al. 1991; Genesee & Bourhis 1982; Giles et al. 1991; Giles & Coupland 1991; Gudykunst 1988)
This paper explores linguistic accommodation among speakers of Tunisian Arabic and speakers of Arabic from the Middle East. It argues that the former tend to unilaterally converge in their language style with the latter. The paper then investigates some of the strategies used to achieve this linguistic convergence and explains its occurrence in terms of the sociopolitical factors which inform the Tunisian-Sharqi relationship rather than merely in terms of comprehensibility.
