Chapter 4 – Culture, Intercultural Competence, and Pragmatics
Language is Culture is Language
Faith Adler; Bibi Halima; and Keli Yerian
Preview Questions
- How do high and low-context cultures affect language use?
- Why is learning pragmatics important?
In our day-to-day lives, we don’t likely give much thought to why we speak the way we do. Sometimes, we’ll say something in a different tone or with slightly different wording to get across a message that goes beyond the content of what we are saying. For example, have you ever received a text from a friend and thought, “They’re definitely mad at me,” even if they did not say it? What is your impression when you read each of the following text messages?
Do they each give a different impression? How do they make you feel? Do any of them make you wonder if the person responding is upset? Perhaps you don’t feel anything different between these examples, and that’s alright too. However, if these differences feel familiar to you, you already have a head start on our next topic.
High-Context and Low-Context Culture
High-context culture (also frequently referred to as more indirect culture) typically values implicit communication where those receiving a message are expected to interpret the message based on a variety of factors, such as environment, relationship, and tone of voice.
On the other end of the scale, cultures using low-context communication (also frequently referred to as more direct culture) tend to favor more explicit communication that doesn’t require as much interpretation on the part of the receiver (Afrouzi, 2021).
By being aware of the differences between high-context communication and low-context communication, we can communicate more effectively, both verbally and non-verbally, in the target language. Moreover, the way these differences in culture play out in different communicative contexts is the subject of our next section. Let’s first take a look at Faith’s perspective.
Author’s Perspective – Faith
When I was studying abroad in Japan, I used to walk around the house barefoot. This was exactly what I would do at home in the U.S. as well. A few times, my host mom would ask me things like: “Aren’t your feet cold?” or “Doesn’t the floor feel strange on your feet?”
After her asking questions like this frequently over a few weeks, I felt like something might be off, so I tried looking up if Japanese people walked around their house barefoot. The result? It wasn’t so positive. I had never studied this part of the culture. I learned that sometimes it can be considered rude or unclean to walk around with bare feet. It could also be that by not using the slippers my host family had given me, they may have felt that I was rejecting part of them.
Because Japan is a high-context culture, without even saying what we were thinking, my host family and I were having a conversation of sorts. Because I was unfamiliar with the culture, much like how Dardashti shared in his video at the beginning of the chapter, I didn’t pick up on the cultural cues. This caused miscommunication between my host mom and I that may have led to some tension if I had not taken the time to investigate the potential cultural background differences that led to our miscommunication.
Pragmatics
Have you ever had an inside joke with a good friend? Or is there a movie you quote often with your family? Or perhaps you’ve tried to tell a funny story, but you did not know quite how to explain it and ended up saying, “You just had to be there.”
When this happened, you were part of an “in-group,” where your shared past experiences with certain members of that group contributed to the things you were talking about, and affected how you interacted with those around you both verbally and non-verbally. This doesn’t only occur on a small scale. This can be seen within cultures of a community, country, and everything in-between.
How communities share norms around language use is the focus of pragmatics, or “the study of how context affects meaning” (Anderson et al., 2022, Chapter 8, para. 1). Pragmatics shows us that culture speaks. It is not voiceless, and it can influence language. High-context communication and low-context communication is one example. This is just one of the many areas that pragmatics includes.
Watch this video from the Center for Applied Second Language Studies (CASLS) to understand more about how the pragmatics of simple expressions can have a large impact on the success of our interactions with others.
With what you learned from the video, consider again the text message examples you read at the beginning of this page. Depending on our cultural and individual experience, the replies could all give vastly different impressions. For many L1 English speakers, the replies across the three example text messages will not feel the same. One may come across as more understanding, while another might let us know that the person we are texting with is frustrated.
Though for many the difference may feel clear, those who are just learning U.S. English may not understand the subtle differences in each of these texts. It takes a strong pragmatic knowledge of both the English language, and the culture of the community, to take command of these linguistic tools.
ROTEX Perspective: Addressing Elders
One thing Olivia struggled with was what to call certain people, especially her teachers. In Turkish, there’s a lot of ways to address different people, all at different formality levels. Related to the high value on education in Turkey, it was expected that you would address teachers incredibly formally, but she didn’t understand that going in. When she was adjusting and would accidentally address teachers incorrectly, she said that she would get a really negative response and it was a bit jarring.
Reflect and Connect
Is there a time you’ve experienced misunderstanding someone because of differences in pragmatic understanding? Misunderstandings like this can come from a variety of factors: social groups, age, life experiences, and more can impact how we interpret implied cues. Looking back, have you run into this before?
Why Learn Pragmatics?
Being aware of pragmatic principles in any given languaculture can give the learner a stronger command of the language and the ability to communicate more effectively with members of its culture. The implication behind one’s actions and word choices communicates pragmatic meaning, whether the speaker intends it to or not.
Therefore, without understanding pragmatic implications it is easy to miscommunicate intention in a second language where one is unaware of pragmatic norms, such as how in the text messaging example above, saying “No worries” may indicate a different pragmatic meaning than “K.” If you weren’t familiar with this pragmatic difference, you could create a lot of distance between yourself and your friend unintentionally.
However, when we are aware, it can give us more confidence to interact with members of the language’s culture and ask questions respectfully. In Faith’s example of being barefoot in her Japanese host family’s house, if she had been considering her host mom’s inquiries from a high-context perspective sooner, she might have felt more confident to ask her host mother about it earlier. She may have been able to save both of them from some awkward tension created by approaching the situation with the low-context perspective that she was used to. The importance of considering pragmatics and seeing things from a more high-context perspective was one of the (many) things she learned from that misunderstanding.
ROTEX Perspective: Sarcasm
One thing we all noticed was how poorly sarcasm translated. This is a feature that seems to be somewhat unique and not utilized across many languages in the same ways. We all noted that even in the peak of our language usage, none of us could successfully employ sarcasm in our second languages. It almost never came across right, and even seemed offensive in some cases. It’s also something that we frequently notice is difficult for English language learners to begin employing. This is because sarcasm needs a lot of pragmatic nuance in order to successfully deliver the message the sender wants to give. Navigating pragmatics requires mutual understanding of how languages may be used differently across cultures.
References
Afrouzi, O. A. (2021). Humanitarian behavior across high-/low-context cultures: A comparative analysis between Switzerland and Colombia. Journal of International Humanitarian Action, 6(1), 1-10. https://doi.org/10.1186/s41018-020-00088-y.
Anderson, C., Bjorkman, B., Denis, D., Doner, J., Grant, M., Sanders, N., & Tanaguchi, A. (2022). Essentials of linguistics (2nd ed.). Open Library Publishing Platform. https://ecampusontario.pressbooks.pub/essentialsoflinguistics2/
A social group that one identifies with psychologically
Compare to "out-group": a group that one does not identify with
The study of how context affects meaning
The idea that a language is made up not only of its grammatical and vocabulary elements, but also past knowledge, inventions, cultural information, and behaviors that contribute to language change over time
The use of more explicit communication that doesn’t require as much interpretation on the part of the receiver. It can be referred to as more direct culture
Typically values implicit communication where those receiving a message are expected to interpret the message based on a variety of factors, such as environment, relationship, and tone of voice. It can be referred to as more indirect culture