Comparative Approach to Accommodation Strategies in Selected Doctor-Patient Interactions in The Nupe and Yoruba Contexts

Abstract

The interactional value of medical discourse is often affected by specific contextual and anthropological issues arising from the diversity in the sociocultural backgrounds of interlocutors. Also, contextual factors impact the interactional value of medical discourse. The aim of this study was to examine two distinct cultures within the Nigerian setup and their impact on doctor-patient interaction. The study examines how the Nupe and Yoruba anthropological characteristics influence the adoption of accommodation strategies in medical discourses to achieve the communicative goal. Also, how power and ideology are reflected and managed in the medical discourse in these distinct cultures is critically examined in this study. Two purposively selected doctor-patient conversations in the two cultures, Yoruba and Nupe, were analysed using the tenets of Dragojevic, Gasiorek & Giles’ (2021) Communication Accommodation Theory (CAT). The study found that cultural differences abound in the selected medical discourse under investigation. Also, the use of accommodation strategies depends on the individual linguistic prowess. Despite the fact that the adoption of convergence strategies is an expected norm in medical discourse; power negotiation arising from class and age differences among interlocutors often results to the use of divergence strategy.