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Interactional Sociolinguistics: Perspectives on Intercultural Communication
Cultural Difference as a Discourse Problem
The political upheavals and large-scale human migrations of the past three decades have transformed today’s urban environments and have significantly affected social relations in the conduct of everyday affairs. Populations that in the past were separated by distances of thousands of miles and were largely unknown to each other except for travelers’ accounts, who differ not only in language but in ways of viewing the world established and reinforced through thousands of years of historically separate experiences, now live side by side, and exchange communications in the same urban settings. Journalists and political commentators attempting to explain the previous long-term co-existence of distinct religious ideologies, patterns of family, friendship, and peer group relations, attitudes to work, leisure, and the differences in ways of speaking that reflect them, most often use the term cultural difference. More recently, as the formerly homogeneous European-based societies have become more diverse, the concept of multiculturalism previously restricted to anthropological descriptions has entered general usage. In fact the term “culture” in today’s social ecologies is no longer the sole province of anthropologists studying geographically bounded or isolated peoples in largely face-to-face formations. Specialists in corporate ...
