Modeling Motives for Bilingual Accommodation by Minority and Majority Language Speakers

Abstract

Within the framework of communication accommodation theory, this study examined how self-reported motives for linguistic convergence and divergence by speakers of majority and minority languages (in demographic terms) predict language use in Finland, a bilingual country. In so doing, we also offer a novel approach to modeling motivation for linguistic accommodation. For majority language speakers, motives to converge, but not motives to diverge, were significant predictors of linguistic convergence to the outgroup. However, the opposite pattern was found for minority language speakers. To our knowledge, this is the first study to model how multiple self-reported motives for language use theorized by communication accommodation theory jointly map onto linguistic behavior in a bilingual setting.