11. The specificity of verbal communication across cultures.

Communication is the process through which participants create and share information with one another as they move toward reaching mutual under­standing, Communication is involved in every aspect of daily life, from birth to death. It is universal. Because communication is so pervasive, it is easy to take it for granted and even not to notice it.

One way to understand the crucial role of communication in all human activities is to consider individuals who have had little or no human communication.

Isolates are children who for some reason have grown up without talking to anyone. While physically human, such isolates cannot talk or read and are completely lacking in social relationship skills. Some isolates were kept in an attic or a basement and fed regularly but not allowed contact with humans. When such isolates have been freed from their isolation, often when they are adolescents, they are socially much like infants. Communication with others is essential to the process of personality development and socializing.

Feral children are humans who have been raised by animals. A number of accounts of feral children are available. While some may be of doubtful authenticity, several cases provide fascinating insights into what it is like to grow up without human interaction. Feral children illustrate the essentially social nature of being human. If one cannot communicate, one will not assimilate the qualities associated with being human.

What are the main elements in the communication process through which participants create and share information with one another in order to reach a mutual understanding? Human communication is never per­fectly effective. The receiver usually does not decode a message into exactly the same meaning that the source had in mind when encoding the message. A code is a classification such as a language used by individuals to categorize their experience and to communicate it to others. Decoding is the process by which the physical message is converted into an idea by the receiver. Encod­ing is the process by which an idea is converted into a message by a source.

When the source and the receiver do not share a common value regarding the message content, effec­tive communication is unlikely to occur, leading to conflict. The more dissimilar (heterophilous) the source and receiver, the more likely that their com­munication will be ineffective.

Intrapersonal and Interpersonal Communication

"Language is primarily a vocal actualization of the tendency to see reality symbolically" (Edward Sapir, 1921). Communication is fundamentally intrapersonal. Intrapersonal communication is information exchange that occurs inside of one person. It is the process of selecting and interpreting symbols to represent thoughts, perceptions, or physical reality. In contrast, interpersonal communication involves the face-to-face exchange of informa­tion between two or more people. Interpersonal communication is the pro­cess of exchanging mutually understood symbols.

Intercultural communication also begins with intrapersonal communica­tion and ways of thinking. Levels of meaning suggest that meaning is assigned to messages during the decoding process, rather than residing in messages to be discovered. Based on our experiences, we develop attitudes, beliefs, and values that then influence the meanings we assign. Our culture accounts for a very large portion of what we experience and how we interpret the experience. Culture is critical in the meaning assignment pro­cess, which is fundamental to human communication.

Intercultural communication depends on an understanding of the belief system of the other person. Cultural belief systems serve as message filters that determine, to a certain degree, the meaning each person assigns to mes­sages and how events are perceived. The notion of cultural-ways-of-thinking is used here in a broad sense to include religions, countries, cultures, belief systems, and behaviorally and demographically defined groups.

Language is a key influence in intercultural communication. Lan­guage is the use of vocalized sounds, or written symbols representing these sounds or ideas, in patterns organized by grammatical rules in order to express thoughts and feelings. The people of a particular nation or ethnic group who share a language usually share a common history and a set of traditions. Speaking a particular language gives an individual a cultural identification. If the language of a cultural group disappears, the members of the cultural group find it difficult or impossible to maintain their culture, and they will be assim­ilated into another language/culture. An example is the Irish people, who lost their language (Celtic), and have become assimilated, at least in part, into English culture.

The assignment of meaning to a message concerns human perceptions about the relationship between symbols and their referents. Language is used to think as well as to speak. Linguistic relativity is the degree to which language influences human thought and meanings. It proposes that in human thought language intervenes between the symbols and the ideas to which the symbols refer. Linguistic relativity proposes that language and thought are so tied together that a person's language determines the categories of thought open to the person. Linguistic relativity is also called the Whorfian hypothesis, after its main creator, Benjamin Lee Whorf.

For linguists, anthropologists, and scholars of intercultural com­munication, the Whorfian hypothesis proposed a new paradigm, a new way of thinking about language and culture.

Language influences our thinking in an unconscious manner, which is one reason why the notion of linguistic relativity is so fascinating to most of us. Whorf and Sapir claimed that a cultural system is embodied in the language of the people who speak the language. This cultural framework shapes the thoughts of the lan­guage's speakers. An individual is typically not aware of this indirect but per­vasive influence. We think in the words and the meanings of our language, which in turn is an expression of our culture. Only when an individual learns a second language and tries to move back and forth to his/her mother tongue does the individual become aware of the influence that language has on perception.

Consider some examples of linguistic relativity. In India, the Hindi lan­guage has no single words that are equivalent to the English words "uncle" and "aunt." Instead, Hindi has different words for your father's older brother, father's younger brother, mother's older brother, mother's older brother-in-law, and so forth. This diversity of terms suggests that the inter­personal relationships involved between an individual and his/her uncles and aunts are much more important in India than in nations where English is spoken. Many languages in addition to Hindi are richer than English in the number of words for different family and kinship relationships (Russian, for example).

In general, when a language has a large number of words for the same object or class of objects, that object is relatively important. Thus Dine (the language spoken by the Navajo) has thousands of words for the English expression "to go," the infinitive showing action.

Even among the European family of languages, however, there are impor­tant differences. Imagine the Germans looking at a masculine moon (der Mond), The French on the other side of the Rhine look at the same moon, but it is feminine (la lune). The sun is feminine in German (die Sonne) and masculine in French (le soleil). To the English across the English Channel, the moon and the sun are neither masculine nor feminine. Such gender differences in languages influence how the Germans, French, and English perceive the same objects.

The most famous example used to illustrate the concept of linguistic rela­tivity is the Inuit language. It is claimed that the Inuit (a tribe of Native Americans in northwestern Canada) have twelve words for "snow" and 42 types of snow to describe different types —wet snow, packed snow, or powder snow—in English, speakers must use an adjective plus the noun. Because they have more options of words to convey shades of meaning about snow, one could reasonably infer that snow is really important to the Inuit.

Mean­while, Arabs are a little unbelievably said to have six thousand words for camels and camel accoutrements, and Tasmanian aborigines have a word for every specific type of tree but no word that means just tree. Poignantly, the Araucanian Indians of Chile have a variety of words for describing dif­ferent degrees of hunger.

Tahitians have many names for one species of fish that they catch in the lagoons. Each noun denotes the size and the stage of maturity of the species—thereby causing and requiring a close and discerning focus both in speaking and in observation. Tahitians also use a whole glossary of words for the coconut, giving it a series of noun designators related to the size, ma­turity, and use of each coconut. Further, there is a whole lexicon of terms that apply to the coconut tree.

The Whorfian hypothesis of linguistic relativity has provided a major con­tribution to intercultural communication. The hypothesis demonstrates the importance of language in communication. More generally, Whorf and Sapir showed that language, thought, and culture are closely connected. Lan­guage, which is a part of culture, affects human behavior through thought and perception, thus linking culture to human behavior.