How Culture Affects Communication

Understanding how culture affects Communication
comprehending the verbal and nonverbal meanings of a message is difficult even when communicators are from the same culture. When they come from different cultures, special sensitivity and skills are necessary. Every country has a unique culture or common heritage, joint experience, and shared learning that produce its culture. Their common experience gives people of that culture a complex system of shared values and customs. It teaches them how to behave; it conditions their reactions. The more you know about culture in general and your own culture in particular, the better able you will be to adopt an intercultural perspective. Context is one of the most important cultural dimensions, yet it is among the most difficult to define.

Culture, gender, personality and communication
Interpersonal communication is a topic that is accepted differently by different people and depends on the contest of the communication. To manage intercultural interaction effectively, speakers need to be aware of the inherent norms of their own speech practices, the ways in which norms vary depending on situational factors and the ways in which speakers from other language backgrounds may have different expectations of language usage and behavior Communication in many cases can be misinterpreted due to different cultures, even different skin color or different nationality. There is a little hint of discrimination among the people when meet a person from different nationality and talk with accent. I personally witnessed this discrimination. The first impression is that if you do not understand something, and ask the person to repeat the question, the question will be repeated in a louder voice.

The other impression that I have with culture was when someone unknowing my culture just assume that you are coming from a different world that you don’t belong to be in my cultural. I’m born and raised in New York, this is one of the well-known states, I’m a type of person that would like to meet different kinds of people and have a connection with them. When 9/11 happened and I was at work that day. We were all watching the news when one of my coworker asked me: “Why people these days want to be in war with U.S and are doing this to the American people”? It took me a minute to answer this question; it was even funny at that moment. For me inter cultural communication can be possible only in between people with the same ethnic background or people who studied culture. In case of cross-cultural communication, there will always be some misunderstandings. There is some communications in my everyday life with my coworkers and friends that I would try to understand them sincerely…