Speech: Convergence and Divergence

Let us see the different ways in which a person may accommodate to the speech of his or her interlocutor and the reasons for doing so. For example, a teacher addressing his students or a mother talking to her baby may simplify their vocabulary and grammatical patterns in their attempt to make themselves understood. In this case, they converge downwards towards their addressees’ less advanced linguistic proficiency. How else could they put their message across? When a sociologist tries to explain a phenomenon using simple vocabulary, he actually converges downwards towards all those who are not versed in the jargon. Of course, speech convergence involves many other cases, as well; when an acquaintance of ours pronounces “leak” as “lick,” it is probably the case that, out of politeness, we will ignore her mistake and go on with the conversation. Nevertheless, we may have a vested interest in pleasing our addressee, i.e., we may curry favour with her because we want her to lend us some money or help us with our Maths project! The same applies to a young employee who, aspiring to a salary rise or promotion, uses formal language when addressing his employers. In other words, he converges upwards towards them. Moreover, affective language and phatic expressions such as Hello, how are you this morning? or I’m awfully sorry, are clear examples of speech convergence, inasmuch as they express solidarity and enhance rapport. Finally, consider the speech of those coming from the same region or socio-economic and political background. Fashion designers coming from Athens or shepherds hailing from Crete tend to use much the same pronunciation and style.

For obvious reasons, a speaker may deliberately diverge from the speech of his interlocutor, thus signalling his intention to disagree with, or even repudiate, him. For example, it is often the case that a fifteen-year old boy will regularly resort to swearing, especially when addressing his friends, as a means of running counter to his parents’ “authority.” At any rate, a lot of young people have the proclivity towards a different kind of register and pronunciation, so they may come out with, say, ?? ???? ??? ?????? (a Greek expression meaning “I saw red”) or meeding instead of meeting. In the same vein act minority ethnic groups who are out to maintain their cultural identity and distinctiveness, using their own linguistic variety in interaction with majority group members. Another case of speech divergence is the linguistic behaviour of black people who speak what has been called Black English or that of French people who do not deign, one could say, to use any other language even if they are asking for help! Even women’s speech exhibits marked differences compared to the speech of men, provided that the former use more polite expressions and seem to adopt standard forms, while the latter tend to exercise their “right” to do as they see fit. As Robin Lakoff once said, “women collude in their own subordination by the way they speak.” Finally, a clear example of speech divergence is the use of metaphors in Literature, in that the message cloaked in this kind of register is accessible only to those who are conversant with the code. In this way, the members of certain groups or communities can erect walls that, on the one hand, exclude the ones who cannot penetrate the mind of the speaker or the writer, but on the other, help cultivate intimacy and a sense of community. For example, if I say He is an Adonis, I am virtually creating a void between the ones who are familiar with the story of this person—and thus know what this expression means—and the ones who are not.