Diasporic communication: cultural deviance and accommodation among Tibetan exiles in India

Abstract

Diasporic communities around the world regularly encounter challenges of preserving their identities and communication practices while adapting to their host social-cultural environment. Grounded in communication accommodation theory (CAT) and informed by recent research on deviance, this study investigated the relationships between Tibetan identity, language, and communication accommodation in the Indian diaspora. It was found that a pro-normative speaker was more likely to be accommodated to than normative and anti-normative speakers, but no interaction was found between raters’ ingroup identification and perceived normativeness of the speakers, as was predicted. In addition, perceptions of identity support and social evaluation together proved to be a much stronger predictor of reported communication accommodation to the speakers than the extent of raters’ ingroup identification. The findings are discussed in terms of their importance for CAT and intragroup cultural communication.