Chapter 4: Communication and Language

Overview

English has become the lingua franca of the business world, and people from Amsterdam to Zanzibar use it every day as a tool of the trade. They also spend a lot of time and money trying to eliminate their language mistakes, not realizing that the fewer they make the more dangerous the errors are likely to become, because people aren t expecting them. Furthermore, just because someone has mastered the grammar and vocabulary of a language and pronounces it better than some native speakers does not mean he or she uses it in the same way.

Communication is not only about what the words mean in the dictionary, it s also about how you string them together. There is, after all, a certain difference between Do that job tomorrow, I d appreciate it if you did that job tomorrow, and Do that job tomorrow or I ll have your guts for garters, even if all three phrases are designed to achieve the same end. Those of us who are native English speakers have a responsibility not to use expressions that are likely to confuse non-native speakers (e.g., Have you cottoned on, or do I have to spell that out to you? ). We also have to ensure that when born English speakers encounter a communication style that seems brusque, unfriendly, or arrogant in someone whose native language is not English, they will not assume that this is a true reflection of this person s personality or intention . It may well be that the speaker hasn t mastered the many nuances of words and body language that a native speaker interprets without even thinking about it. So in an unfamiliar culture, newcomers may find themselves wondering if the downcast eyes that accompany a statement are a sign of modesty or dishonesty.

Recently I ran an intercultural simulation, one part of which involved a group of ten British participants learning to be members of a fictitious culture. This made-up culture valued touch, and as part of the exercise participants were encouraged to touch each other at every opportunity, especially when communicating with each other. The simulation was a nightmare for everyone involved. The older male members of the group in particular found it extremely difficult to touch their colleagues at all. It wasn t surprising. Their physical contact with non-family members over the last forty years had been limited to a handshake with customers and a quick elbow in the ribs from strangers on a crowded subway , so to learn to communicate with colleagues in a tactile way that is the norm for millions of people in Latin America or Africa was just too much of a challenge.

Communication is about your facial expression, gestures, and actions. This was brought home to me a few years ago when a young family moved in to the next farm. My Swedish husband was born and brought up on a farm located on an island off the Swedish coast , and the new family had moved there from an outlying island and had two young children, as we did.

The four kids started to play together one day and were having a wonderful time when it started to rain. I went out and asked them, in Swedish, if they wanted to come into the house to play. The two new children looked at me and said nothing, then suddenly turned tail and ran as fast as they could in the direction of their home.

I couldn t make any sense of this, but when I went in and told my husband what had happened he showed no surprise. Without looking up from his newspaper he said, They ve gone home to ask their mother if they can come in. I was amazed. How did he know? He d never even met them. But sure enough, in a couple of minutes there was a knock at the door and there they stood. Thinking about it, there were two things that surprised me. The first was that the two children hadn t said a word when I d asked them a question, and the second was that my husband had understood the whole situation without even having seen what had happened.

The explanation was, of course, that he and the two children shared the same cultural roots. He had grown up, as they had, in a community where everyone knew everyone else; a homogenous community where people understood what their neighbors would do before they did it. If you grow up in a society like this you don t need to spell things out. Communication takes place without words because the situation is familiar and is governed by a set of unwritten rules that everyone understands.

If, on the other hand, you look at a country with an entirely different profile, like the U.S., for example, a relatively new country where enormous numbers of people immigrated from other cultures, communication patterns developed quite differently. With high levels of mobility as thousands of people headed west across the continent , individuals were forced to get to know one another quickly and establish their own rules as they went along. It s clear that in such a situation good communication skills were vital , because you couldn t expect the people you met to share your background or assumptions, so your communications with your peers had to be clear, unambiguous, and explicit. This explains why today many people in the U.S. have a very different communication style than the natives of the small island off the west coast of Sweden ”and many other places where people have known each other all their lives.

• MORAL The way we communicate, and what we do or do not say, may be entirely mystifying to people from other cultures, even though we believe we have made ourselves perfectly clear.