“Where Are You From?” Language Attitudes and (Non)Accommodation During Native–Nonnative Speaker Interactions in Germany

Abstract

Guided by the language attitudes literature and communication accommodation theory (CAT), we conducted semistructured interviews with nonnative-accented speakers in Germany to explore how they experience, interpret, and react to everyday communicative interactions with native German speakers. Irrespective of their demographics, nonnative speakers consistently expressed that native speakers construed them as foreigners and ascribed them negative stereotypic traits. Nonnative speakers reported experiencing both accommodation and nonaccommodation during their interactions with native speakers, but reports of the latter—especially underaccommodation—were more frequent. Although nonnative speakers associated their interactions with native speakers with positive affect overall, they also reported experiencing considerable emotional distress due to frequent communication difficulties and native speakers’ nonaccommodative moves, which they responded to in a variety of ways (e.g., self-blame and social withdrawal). Our findings offer several insights about native–nonnative speaker interactions from the latter's perspective and contribute to both the language attitudes and CAT literatures.