Call for papers: The African CAT: Language, Identity, and Communication Accommodation in African Contexts, Language and Intercultural Communication. Deadline: abstract only, 1 December 2025.
Guest Editors: Howard Giles (University of California, Santa Barbara, USA & University of Queensland, Australia) and Tekena Mark (Rivers State University, Nigeria)
Over the past five decades, Communication Accommodation Theory (CAT) has evolved into one of the most empirically rich and theoretically robust frameworks for understanding how individuals adapt to—or distance themselves from—others in interpersonal and intergroup communication. Originally formulated as Speech Accommodation Theory (Giles, Taylor, & Bourhis, 1973), CAT has since expanded to encompass a wide range of verbal and nonverbal behaviors, including accent, dialect, speech rate, gestures, clothing, and even silence as well a wide array of social groups, languages, applied and institutional contexts, new technologies (e.g., human-machine interactions and social media) and even non-human species (e.g., Giles, Markowitz, & Clementson, 2025).
Yet, despite its global applicability, African communicative practices have remained under-researched in CAT scholarship and, indeed, in intercultural scholarship more generally. That said, there has, very recently, been a flurry of CAT activity on a broad range of topics emerging from all around the continent of Africa. This Special Issue is, therefore, very timely and aims to cohere and expand developments in CAT and their possible synergies with intercultural communication research through African perspectives. Toward the latter end, this will be achieved, for instance, by drawing attention to indigenous languages, sociocultural norms, multilingual negotiations, and communicative strategies shaped by colonial legacies, identity politics, and evolving digital cultures.
Key theoretical developments relevant to this Special Issue include entrainment, mimicry, interactive alignment (van de Pol et al., 2023), and the dynamic co-existence of convergence, divergence, and maintenance (Guydish & Fox Tree, 2021). We invite rich, context-sensitive, and culturally-grounded analyses that speak to everyday communicative realities in African communities, institutions, and diasporas. In line with the editorial vision of Language and Intercultural Communication (LAIC), authors are especially encouraged to explore and establish synergies between CAT and the critical approach to intercultural communication, as developed in IALIC (International Association for Languages and Intercultural Communication) and reflected across LAIC’s publications. This may involve questioning power dynamics, ideological positioning, colonial histories, and the ethics of communicative encounters.
His work on intercultural language education engages with the roles curriculum design and classroom tasks play in the development of intercultural communicative competence, most recently in situations of conflict and extended crisis. He is also interested in the interaction between intercultural language education and professionalism in domains such as medicine and tourism. He is the author of An Intercultural Approach to English Language Teaching (Multilingual Matters, 2003, second edition 2022), Intercultural Language Activities (Cambridge University Press, 2010) and (with Peih-ying Lu) of English in Medicine: An Intercultural Approach to Teaching Language and Values (Multilingual Matters, 2012). He has authored and co-authored numerous articles and book chapters, including (with Wendy Anderson and Alison Phipps) explorations of intercultural language learning and telecollaboration. He was editor of the journal Language and Intercultural Communication between 2004-9. While he works in Asia, he also has strong links with Brazil, where he has been President of the BRAZ-TESOL Special Interest Group on Intercultural Language Education.
Center for Intercultural Dialogue 