The Influence of Changing Group Vitality on Convergence toward a Dominant Linguistic Norm: an Israeli Example

Introduction Giles has proposed Speech Accommodation Theory (SAT) to account for language usage between individuals (see e.g. Giles et al., 1977). That theory is concerned with determining what motivates an individual to de-accentuate ethnolinguistic characteristics and converge toward the dominant culture, or to accentuate his/her ethnolinguistic characteristics and diverge from the dominant patterns. Giles and other social psychologists have found that while regional dialects (or accents) connote integrity and a variety of socially attractive attributes, standard accents connote high socio-economic status and intellectual competence. They theorise that speakers will converge toward the dominant accent to the degree that they desire social approval from members of the dominant culture. While SAT primarily is concerned with accommodation of individual speakers, Giles and Johnson (1987) theorise that group patterns can be understood using elaborations of this theory. They do so partly by introducing the concept of group vitality. Giles believes that the degree of accommodation which takes place depends on group vitality.