The article Cross-Cultural Communication- Deborah Tannen (1985) dwells on how complex language, and therefore, interaction is and how culture-dependent the interpretation of communication mediums can be. Though complex, cross-cultural communication is indispensable to today’s world in which international relations are much more frequent and common than any other time in history. It is not uncommon for people from different backgrounds to try to communicate, whether it be due to student exchange programs, moving or cross-cultural marriages. This communication encompasses much more than mere language knowledge. Language is made up of prosodic features too; tone of voice, pitch, loudness, pacing and pauses, all contribute to the intended and interpreted meaning. To be able to keep intended meaning as close as possible to the interpreted meaning, one has to decipher contextualization clues, since ‘how an utterance is said communicates meta-messages about the relationship between interactions’. Tannen summarizes the essence of human communication very well when she generalizes the importance of culture-based discourse to take place even between two people from the same country are communicating, because she reminds the reader the fact that every person will essentially bear the traits of his upbringing, hometown, gender, age, cultural background, etc. I agreed most with this statement since I, myself, have had culture-dependent, communication problems, especially with my husband’s family who are from the same country with me, but from a rather distant cultural background to mine, with a different dialect and accent of Turkish. We have, in time, experienced numerous misunderstandings resulting from ‘prosodic’ features of the same language that we use to communicate. I also was particularly interested in the recording from a thanks giving dinner because I have had the experience of sitting at a thanksgiving dinner party which hosted multicultural guests who tried to communicate without offending each other on sensitive political issues. Expectations definitely determined understanding, just like Tannen puts it. I personally observed the two benefits of rapport that Tannen refers to. We did establish a seemingly sincere rapport, on the other hand we did avoid direct confrontation of the messages we gave, to be polite and not to bring up an open debate at the table. The topic being the Armenian Genocide, the dinner party was, to me, just like a match in which the ball was thrown from one to the other without hurting each other. What contributed to the tense aura was the awareness of the participants- there were several university professors and 3-4 of them were language teachers- who were too aware of the possibility of misunderstanding messages since our utterances l bore the characters of our background, our culture and that we were thriving to survive in a ‘foreign’ context. However, in real life as Tannen claims, most speakers assume that their system is self-evidently ‘the’ system. I do agree with Tannen in that as language teachers in addition to the structure of the language, what might be an uncomfortable silence and what sort of questions can be considered showing a sign of interest in the other person, what would show appreciation of the talk, etc. might be dwelled on. I loved the expression ‘machine gun questions’, they are very common in Turkish and Mediterranean cultures, and might be interpreted to be ‘rude’ in western cultures. A ‘processable’ utterance depends on the proximity of the repertoires of the speakers, it seems. To that end, increased exposure to language is a must. The signposts that are turned round should be clear in the mind of the participants of a dialogue to avoid misunderstandings.
Reference:
Tannen, D. (1985) Cross-Cultural Communication in Handbook of Discourse Analysis vol 4. London: Academic Press.