Language

Language

1. Successful communication with someone from another culture involves understanding a common language.

   • Without this shared language, communication problems may occur when a third party, the translator or interpreter, attempts to convey both the verbal and nonverbal intent of a message.

2. People who speak English as a second language retain much of their foreign accent. Those for whom Spanish is a first language and English the second language, for example, often pronounce vowels as they are pronounced in the Spanish language.

   • For example, “e” is pronounced as “a” and “i” is pronounced as “e.” They may also pronounce certain consonants as they would in Spanish, such as “j” is pronounced as “h”.

3. Language holds us together as groups, differentiates us into groups, and controls the way we shape concepts, how we think, how we perceive, and how we judge others.

4. When we understand how important and complex that a culture’s native language is, it is easier to see why in a country such as India, English is the official language.

5. The women are more personal, understanding, and sympathetic than men. They also use more verbal hedges and more qualifying terms than men. Women, however, have a more difficult time handling professional criticism objectively than men.

6. The more important a language is viewed to be, the more important the group using the language is in terms of economic, social, and language status.

7. The diversity of languages causes problems both for managers and applicants for jobs.

8. Other problems caused by language diversity include foreigners who speak their native language on the job, a practice that is not viewed favorably by the nationals.

9. Although the main reason foreigners may use their native language is to express their ideas easily, this behavior is interpreted as an attempt to exclude nationals from the conversation and is considered extremely rude.

10. The important thing here is that in our language or in any other we always have to know how to express ourselves correctly, the diversity of language goes hand in hand with the cultural shock, as in the chapter above, since you have to know how to express yourself correctly , studying your market so as not to cause a big cultural shock.

11. Many languages are spoken differently by the men and women of the same culture. For example, in Japanese, the women speak with a softer intonation than men do. People reveal class differences by their accent, phrasing, and word usage.

12. Language can be both unifying and divisive. A common native language ties people together, yet the presence of many different native languages in a small geographic area can cause problems.

13. Linguistic determinism is the assumption that a person’s view of reality stems mainly from his or her language.