Cross-Cultural Communication: Concepts, Cases and Challenges By ...

The Power of Language

Language is the key to the heart of a culture. So related are language and culture that language holds the power to maintain national or cultural identity. According to Edwards (1985), language is important in ethnic and nationalist sentiment because of its power and visible symbolism.

Because of the relationship between language and cultural identity, steps are often taken to prohibit the influence of other languages. For example, Costa Rica recently enacted a law that restricts the use of foreign languages and imposes fines on those who break it. Under the law, companies that advertise in a foreign language must also include a Spanish translation in larger letters. Likewise, France has a list of 3,500 foreign words that cannot be used in school, bureaucracies, or companies (Samovar and Porter, 2001).

Clearly, it is impossible to separate language from culture. According to Rubin (1992), language is a set of characters or elements and rules for their use in relation to one another. It can be discovered when studying another language that not only are the symbols (words) and sounds for those words different, but so are the rules (phonology, grammar, syntax, and intonation) for using those symbols and sounds.

Language is much more than just a symbol and rule system that permits communication with another person; it is also the means by which people think and construct reality. According to Nanda&Warms (1998), language does more than just reflect culture; it is the way in which an individual is introduced to the order of the physical and social environment.

Similarly, when a person chooses specific words to communicate, he or she is signaling membership in a particular culture or subculture by demonstrating that he or she knows the language. However, the language or vocabulary used imposes its own barriers on the message. For example, the language of a physician differs from that of an accountant, and the differences in their vocabularies affect their ability to recognize and express ideas.

Barriers also exist because words can be interpreted in more than one way. For example, to someone in the U.S., the word “catastrophe” can be used to describe a relatively small problem. In Belize, Central