If you want to work effectively with your colleagues, talk like them.

This may seem obvious, but even if French speakers speak the same language, they do not necessarily use the same words or grammatical structures. Linguistic variations that are anything but trivial, if we are to believe them a study published in the newspaper Language and Cognition. Its authors say that we are more likely to collaborate with people who speak like us.[M]Even small linguistic differences, of which we are not always aware, can influence our willingness to cooperate with others.“, explains Theresa Matzinger, lead author of the study, in a press release.

Theresa Matzinger and her colleagues have formulated two hypotheses that would explain this phenomenon. They put forward the idea that we tend to be more cooperative towards individuals with similar linguistic preferences to ours because we see this as a sign that they come from the same background as us; or because we appreciate the efforts they make to adapt their speech, and therefore be in linguistic convergence.

The researchers tested the veracity of these two hypotheses on a hundred English speakers. They had to choose, from four descriptions, which one best matched the image they saw. Some were false, and others were correct, even if they used different turns of phrase. The participants then had to repeat the experiment, but this time they had only the choice between two textual propositions. They were both correct, and described the image appearing on the screen well. But they were not constructed in the same way in terms of grammar.

The scientists led participants to believe that the descriptions had been written by two different people. They asked them to choose which of the two they would like to team up with in a cooperative game. It turns out that the volunteers were more likely to collaborate with someone who phrased their sentences in the same way they did.This clearly confirms our first hypothesis, namely that the feeling of belonging to the same social group, based on natural linguistic expressions, is the most decisive factor in the choice of cooperation partners. The idea that the other person adapts to our own way of expressing ourselves and could therefore be more cooperative weighed much less in the balance.” says Theresa Matzinger.

If you want to collaborate effectively with your colleagues, you need to take care of the way you speak. Not to appear more polite, but to give your interlocutor the impression that you are using the same vocabulary and grammatical structures as them. Adapting your speech is the best way to be accepted by others.