From Language Acculturation to Communication Acculturation

A practical problem facing minority family members is how best to acculturate to mainstream culture while maintaining their heritage language and ways of communicating. Language acculturation is well known and includes bilingualism, code-switching, and so forth. At a more subtle level, acculturation affects ways of communicating, referred to here as communication acculturation. This article serves two purposes. First, it highlights the importance of communication acculturation and illustrates this with reference to research on addressee orientation. Second, it points out that although minority families may acculturate passively by conforming to mainstream language and ways of communicating, they can actively create conversational roles that allow them to triumph over external acculturation pressures. This more active form of acculturation is illustrated in communication “brokering,” in which a family member, usually a bilingual middle-aged parent, attempts to broker a conversation between two other members who, because of language mismatch, experience difficulty engaging each other in meaningful collaborative talk.