In bilingual communities, people will frequently make decisions (consciously
or subconsciously) on which language to choose when communicating with different
persons. Similarly, in monolingual communities, where more than one dialect is
spoken, people will also frequently make decisions on which dialect to choose. In
most areas in China, for example, where there are a lot of dialects of the Chinese
language in addition to Mandarin, the standardized language, people would choose
between different dialects, and between dialect and Mandarin1
in interaction with
those from different dialectal areas. While most of the dialects share common
grammatical structures and lexical items, they differ from each other widely in
accent, pronunciation, tone and intonation. While some of the dialects are mutually
intelligible, some of them are not. But as lingua franca, Mandarin can be spoken and
understood by many people from different dialectal areas. This study, working on
the basis of Communication Accommodation Theory (CAT), addresses the issue of
how and why a group of Chinese people, namely, college teachers, change their
dialects in the presence of different interlocutors. As we will see below, although
there have been a lot of studies on communication accommodation of people in
bilingual communities and of those in bi-/multi-dialectal communities, little research
has been done on communication accommodation of people in Chinese communities
where both dialects and Mandarin are spoken.