The Cultural Context

Page 89

Throughout this book, we remind you about the relationship between culture and communication (particularly in Chapter 3). In this section, we examine particular aspects of how cultural context shapes our language, including the relationship among culture, words, and thoughts; the relationship between gender and language; the impact of our region (where we grew up or where we live now); and the ways we accommodate others through our verbal communication choices.

Culture, Words, and Thought. As we have seen, our language use can affect our thoughts. Consider the study of the Pirahã tribe of Brazil (Gordon, 2004) that shows that the Pirahã language does not have words for numbers above two; anything above two is simply called “many.” When researchers laid a random number of familiar objects (like sticks and nuts) in a row and asked the Pirahã to lay out the same number of objects in their own pile, tribe members were able to match the pile if there were three or fewer objects. But for numbers above three, they would only approximately match the pile, becoming less and less accurate as the number of objects increased. In addition, when researchers asked them to copy taps on the floor, the Pirahã did not copy the behavior beyond three taps. Researchers concluded that the limitation of words for numbers above two prevented the Pirahã from perceiving larger numbers (Biever, 2004).

The study’s findings support the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which holds that the words a culture uses (or doesn’t use) influence the thinking of people from that culture (Sapir & Whorf, 1956). In other words, if a culture lacks a word for something (as the Pirahã lack words for higher numbers), members of that culture will have few thoughts about that thing or concept. Two ideas, linguistic determinism and linguistic relativity, are related to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Linguistic determinism posits that language influences how we see the world around us. Linguistic relativity holds that speakers of different languages have different views of the world.

For example, some languages (like Spanish, French, and German) assign a gender to objects. This is a foreign concept to many native speakers of English because English is gender neutral; English speakers simply say the shoe whereas a Spanish speaker marks the word as masculine (el zapato, el being the masculine article); a French speaker marks the word as feminine (la chaussure, la being the feminine article). Some researchers wondered if marking an object as masculine or feminine changes a speaker’s mental picture of the object. To test this, they asked German and Spanish speakers to describe a key (key is a masculine word in German and a feminine word in Spanish). The German speakers described the object in traditionally masculine terms (hard, heavy, jagged, metal, serrated, and useful), whereas the Spanish speakers used traditionally feminine terms (golden, intricate, little, lovely, shiny, and tiny) (Cook, 2002; Moran, 2003; Wasserman & Weseley, 2009).

Gender and Language Cultural and situational factors deeply affect our thinking and perception of gender roles. Gender roles, in turn, are often inscribed with “different languages” for the masculine and the feminine (Gudykunst & Ting-Toomey, 1988). The idea that men and women speak entirely different languages is popular fodder for comedy, talk shows, and pop psychologists, so let’s identify what actual differences have contributed to that view.

In Deborah Tannen’s classic 1992 analysis of men and women in conversation, she found that women primarily saw conversations as negotiations for closeness and connection with others, but men experienced talk more as a struggle for control, independence, and hierarchy.

Indeed, social expectations for masculinity and femininity might play out in men’s and women’s conversation styles, particularly when people are negotiating who has more control in a given relationship. We may use powerful, controlling language to define limits, authority, and relationships. We may use less controlling language to express affection. Let’s look at a few examples.

In summary, research has corroborated some differences in communication style due to sex (Kiesling, 1998), but many of those differences pale when we consider context, role, and task (Ewald, 2010; Mulac, Wiemann, Widenmann, & Gibson, 1988; Newman, Groom, Handelman, & Pennebaker, 2008). The lesson? While a person’s sex may influence his or her communication style, gender—the cultural meaning of sex—has far more influence. Furthermore, some studies have found that conversational topic, age, setting or situation, and the sex composition of groups have just as much influence on language usage as gender (Palomares, 2008). As Mary Crawford (1995) noted, studying language from a sex-difference approach can be misleading because it treats women (and men) as a homogenous “global category,” paying little attention to differences in ethnicity, religion, sexuality, and economic status.

In fact, in more recent work, Tannen (2009, 2010) focuses on how we present our “face” in interaction and how language choices are more about negotiating influence (power, hierarchy), solidarity (connection, intimacy), value formation, and identity rather than about sex (Tannen, Kendall, & Gorgon, 2007). Through decades of research, Tannen and others have shown that we are less bound by our sex than we are by the language choices we make. Thus, regardless of whether we are male or female, we can choose to use language that gives us more influence or creates more connection—or both.

Geography and Language. Our editor from New Jersey assures us that, even in such a small state, it makes a big difference if you are from North Jersey or South Jersey. (The status of people from the middle part of the state remains unclear, at least to us!) People in North Jersey eat subs (sandwiches that you buy at 7-Eleven or QuickChek) and Italian ice (a frozen dessert). The night before Halloween, when shaving cream and toilet paper abound, is Goosey Night or Cabbage Night. And “the city” is, of course, New York City. People from South Jersey eat hoagies (typically from a convenience store called Wawa) and water ice. The night before Halloween is Mischief Night. And going to “the city” means taking a trip to Philadelphia.

As this example illustrates, even for speakers of the same language who grow up just fifty miles apart, culture affects their language and their understanding of the world. Other examples are more extreme. Consider our friend Ada, who kindly shared an embarrassing moment with us (and who is allowing us to tell you). When she came to the United States from Hong Kong, she knew she had to give up some of her Britishisms to communicate more effectively with her American-born classmates at Wesleyan University. This was never more apparent than when she asked a classmate for a rubber (to correct some mistakes in her notebook). She wanted an eraser; he thought she was asking for a condom. Needless to say, she was a bit perplexed by his response: “Maybe after class?”

Accommodation. Accommodation—changing our communication behavior to adapt to the other person—can help us communicate with individuals from different cultures or co-cultures (Giles & Smith, 1979). Code switching and style switching are types of accommodation in which communicators change their regular language and slang, as well as their tonality, pitch, rhythm, and inflection, to fit into a particular group. These language accommodations may be ways to survive, to manage defensiveness, to manage identity, or to signal power or status (Bourhis, 1985). As mentioned, police officers use this type of accommodation when they adopt the street slang or foreign phrases used by citizens in the neighborhoods they patrol and when they use more formal, bureaucratic language when interacting with superiors, filling out reports, or testifying in court.