Varieties of languages and cross-cultural communication - Essay Example

Varieties of languages and cross-cultural communication The present paper provides insights about variations of languages used in daily life and cross-cultural problems, based on my own experience. My first language is English, as well as the language I speak at home, the language of my school and college education, and the language of my linguistic history, since I grew up in the United States. I do not speak other languages, although I have begun learning Spanish and German. The intra-language variation used by me is American English, reflected in my accent, dialect and pronunciation. From a dialectal perspective, my English echoes the American variation due to my geographic provenance and the cultural context in which I grew up. From a sociolinguistic perspective, I use different varieties of languages according to the settings, topics and participants. My spoken English differs from my written English, and they can acquire various forms. The register I use to speak in the classroom, during a presentation or with the teachers is not the same which I use to speak with my family and friends during a spontaneous conversation. Besides, my written English in a chat or informal e-mail has many oral characteristics (use of slang, contractions, colloquial words, repetitions), but my written formal English has vocabulary that I usually do not speak, and I take care of the style and grammar. I live in a country with many immigrants, whose native language is not English. Many of them have learned English after they came, or in their countries of origin, where the taught language differs from the daily spoken language. When these people go to work or study, they can encounter cross-communication problems with native speakers. For example, when we engage in teamwork with foreign students, these problems often appear. Sometimes, due to the accents and pronunciation from their native languages, there could be problems of misunderstanding. When they write, they could use words that they find in their bilingual dictionaries, but these words have not the intended meaning in English, or they sound strange, because they are not used in those contexts. Therefore, I try to speak louder and slower with foreign speakers, and I avoid slang and colloquial words they might not understand if they have not lived in the United States for a long time. Sometimes I speak or write a word, which the foreign speakers do not understand. In this case, I use a synonym or I explain the meaning of the term. Another difficult situation relates to the false cognates, i.e. the English words that are similar in other languages, because they have the same etymological origin, but their meaning is different. Foreign speakers say these words relating them to their native languages, and the consequent misunderstanding surprises them. For example, many foreign speakers have problems with the word career. For Spanish-speaking people, carrera refers also to a degree or university studies, while for German speakers Karriere is restricted to a successful job. Similar problems arise with respect to words with an apparently clear meaning, like family. For English speakers, it refers to the parents and their children, but for Spanish-speaking people, the word familia includes also the relatives. Generally, foreign speakers associate many English words with their own cultures and their linguistic representation of reality. There are also phonetic, grammatical, syntactic and lexical problems when learning foreign languages. For example, the plural and gender distinction in Spanish and German nouns and adjectives is difficult to learn for a native English speaker, as well as the German system of cases and the past tense in Spanish, because this language has imperfect and preterit tense, and it contrasts simple and compound forms. It is for us difficult to conceptualize these differences, since we do not have them in our first language, as Taylor (1995) explains: “… the pastness of an event from the present (a factor involved in the selection of the past tense, in one of its senses, in English), is a continuum, yet a speaker of English must make a discrete choice between the past tense and a non-past tense. One cannot convey degrees of pastness by varying the pastness of the past tense” (75). This situation is comparable with the case of color terms in different languages described by Lakoff (1987), a cognitive issue which relates to the ways experience and thought are arranged in the mind. The subjectivity of tenses always confounds foreign speakers, but the Spanish native speakers use them naturally, as part of their world. That goes beyond grammar rules, and it is learned and mastered through the exposition to many texts and speakers. The grammatical patterns are interpretations of experience, as Whorf (1956) states. In English, we have different uses of the present tense, and they do not only refer to a temporal relation (cf. Whorf 144). The same happens for Spanish and German. Mühlhäsler and Harré (1990) explained that either Sapir or Whorf stated that there was a strong determination from an independent language to a dependent form of experience. “In fact Whorf claimed only that language influenced the classification of what is perceived” (2). There is no one-to-one relationship between the categorization and classification of the realities, beings and objects, and that can lead to cross-cultural problems, when the foreign speakers are not aware of the differences. Furthermore, they proposed that “the grammatical rules for the use of person-indicating expressions in most languages include reference to specific social relations, knowledge of which is required for the relevant words to be used correctly” (Mühlhäsler and Harré 5). That is the case of the second person singular and plural, and formal second person in Spanish and German. As Mühlhäsler and Harré (1990) stated, “in the process of learning the emotion vocabulary of one’s culture, one is learning to discriminate, elaborate or suppress bodily feelings to accord with the local conventions of how one should feel in this or that society defined situation” (7). The same is stated by Wierzbicka (2004). “The vocabulary of emotions is undoubtedly different from language to language. This means that the set of concepts by means of which the speakers of any given language make sense of their own and other people’s feelings is specific to a particular language” (94). The complexity of the own emotions is difficult to express in foreign languages, and foreign students seem to use a few words to express their feelings, because they feel “imprisoned” by language, and often they use gestures or facial expressions to give a more precise account of their feelings. On the contrary, English native speakers have not only the adjectives like sad, upset, angry, but also a variety of colloquial expressions with which we can express ourselves with humor, drama, or joy, and so we can emphasize our feelings. Foreign speakers learn that late, and they usually use those expressions with skepticism. When studying at a university, there is another difficulty, that is, the distinction between expert categories and folk categories, as understood in Taylor (1995). Not only the foreign speaker has to learn the folk categories, those which belong to daily life, but also the expert categories, many of which the have not learned in their first language. It is also possible that the foreign speaker, due to the studies, knows the expert usage of a specific field, while ignoring categories belonging to folk usage. Work Cited Lakoff, George. Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987. Mühlhäsler, Peter and Harré, Rom. Pronouns and People: The linguistic construction of social and personal identity. Oxford: Blackwell, 1990. Taylor, John. Linguistic Categorization: Prototypes in Linguistic Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Whorf, B.J. “The Relation of Habitual Thought and Behavior to Language”. In Language, Thought and Reality. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1956. 134-159. Wierzbicka, Anna. “Preface: Bilingual lives, bilingual experience”. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 25. 2/3 (2004): 94-104. Read More