Language is a non-instinctive way of communicating ideas, emotions and desires using symbols. Language is considered personal preference therefore; language cannot be used to define communication. Language involves overlapping relations of entities such as dialects. Dialects are spoken words combined with sounds to produce meaning communication. Understanding language indexicality, which defines varieties of language dialects in terms of alphabetical listing, the speaker’s origin or speaker’s social identity are important in defining language. During interaction, the speaker can use different languages as a communication strategy. Therefore, the need to understand how listeners respond to language varieties. Matched guise is a technique that can help us understand how a speaker would audio-record reading passages using language varieties.
Matched guise technique analyzes how speaker’s language variety affects people’s perception. When evaluating speech, it’s important to understand the association of the speaker’s variation in speech and the target audience. For this reason, speech accommodation theory analyzes specific elements such as interlocutor which is the converge, when the speaker want to reduce social distance, and the diverge, when the speaker wants to create distinctiveness to increase social distance. The assumption is based on the fact that the communication process has certain convergence which can either be positive or negative. The speakers’ converge or diverge highly depend on the choice of language within bilingual communities because accent or dialect are key features other than just vocal characteristics. Understanding the audience design including the speaker's variation and the speakers’ response to the audience.
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Language usage within a particular context means language is more than just using words. Languages within communities can change causing language shift, proves that language is more of a social identity. The shift in language threatens the existence of certain languages, for example, the Indian language and some aboriginal languages in Australia. Social changes affects language behavior such as cultural pattern of speech and changes in speaking practices within a social context. Patterns of silence as an absence of speech can be used in a communicative way. in some communities, silence is appropriate while in other communities ,silence is not encouraged. For instances, in a situations where strangers meet, from a cultural perspective, the two should not begin to talk. Similarly, politeness is a speaking behavior whereby the facial expressions are used to communicate. Speech behaviors including narratives performance that emphasizes on specific points. Narratives are more of factual account that is constructed by the narrator to pass across certain messages. Most communities emphasize the interaction of people within the narrative because of the cultural values derived from this type of communication.
Researchers also emphasize the interaction between two people as response of previous utterance or later utterance. Hence, the idea of conversational turn-taking is important in understanding speech behavior. Conversation turn taking is about knowing when to speak and end, and how speakers coordinate their conversations to flow smoothly. In this case, transition relevance plays an important role to ensure the conversation becomes useful. Transition can be facilitated in form of different cues such as intonation, nonverbal, and gesture among others. Minimal response is a speech behavior adopted by speakers as a conversational support. Using words such as ‘ mmh ’ , ‘ yeah ’ and ‘ right ’ , listeners indicate attentiveness and involvement in the conversation. Overlapping speech used by females speakers cooperate by using the same language or gesture. Some of the social and cultural factors affecting speaker’s contribution can be described as interaction asymmetrical talk, where one speaker or groups of the speaker in a powerful position have priority over others. This is common in institution s such as school s , the police station and law courts. All the language speaking techniques discussed proves that language interaction is more than just understanding language. Communicative behaviors within certain cultural context also define language and language usage.
