ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the social and communicative aspects of how and why individuals tend to align with their interlocutors in what is known as a process of accommodation. Unlike alignment, which is an unconscious cognitive process, communication accommodation theory views accommodation in language during conversations as partly a conscious process, reflecting the language user’s intention to express social solidarity or social distance. And since language users and their interlocutors connect with one another and form social networks, we consider the role that these networks might play in promoting language variation and change within a bilingual community.
