278 PART lily STYLE, STYLIZATION AND IDENTITY allowable at a football game, and so on). Within Social Psychology, my own discipline, the role of language and communication (some notable exceptions notwithstanding) was considered to be of only peripheral interest. So accom- modation theory was born out of the desire to put, if you like, some socio- psychological meat on the bones of sociolinguistic processes, and to develop a linguistic focus in Social Psychology. In due course the theory evolved to take into account a whole gamut of verbal and nonverbal, linguistic and para- a linguistic, and broadly discursive processes of communicative adaptation. In that way the theory came to be referred to as communication accommodation | theory (CAT), reflecting the fact that its reach extended well beyond local speech (for example, accent) phenomena. q Over the years, with input from colleagues such as Nik Coupland and Cindy | Gallois, CAT has undergone a series of elaborations and refinements, and empirical studies have been undertaken in many parts of the world, involving different languages and an array of distinctive methods (see Giles and Ogay 2006 for a flavor of these). CAT has been invoked in studying many different social group relations and in a range of applied contexts ~ health clinics, law courts, dysfunctional family settings, organizations, new media, to name but a few. The theory spawned other satellite models, including ethnolinguistic 7 identity theory Giles and Johnson 1987), the communicative predicament model of aging (Ryan, Giles, Bartolucci, and Henwood 1986), and the inter- group model of second language learning (Giles and Byrne 1982). Its impact has been not only as one of the major frameworks in the social psychology of language and communication, but also as a stimulus to cross-disciplinary research. Convergence: The Foundation of CAT CAT articulates the motivations driving people’s verbal and nonverbal com= | munication adjustments in interactions, together with the personal and social consequences of these changes (see Gallois, Ogay, and Giles 2006 for | a detailed history of CAT’s development). Accommodation ~ as a process ~. refers to how interactants adjust their communication so as to either diminish or enhance social and communicative differences between them. Such shii can be complete switches of language in a multilingual setting or stylis| shifts within the resources of a single language, as in word choices. The th ory has devoted significant attention to examining how and why we converg of diverge from each other, For example, a teenager may attempt to “fit i with’ members of a popular peer group by acquiring (or converging to) th style of talking, phrases, specific mannerisms, and dress style. Such newly, acquired speech characteristics can sometimes be provocatively exploited by