6.4 Activities and Applications

Here are some considerations in respect to communication in different environmental and professional contexts:

• Adjust your language and communication style to the environment in which you are located. In familiar settings, this is likely something you do automatically – speaking informally with friends over lunch, while using a more formal style in responding to a professor in the classroom. However, in unfamiliar settings, this may not come as easily. Heightened cultural sensitivity is especially needed in sites of significant cultural importance – places of worship, monuments. Speaking loud in a hallowed space, like the top of a holy mountain is inappropriate, as is snapping selfies of yourself naked.
• Beware of pragmatic transfer in speaking in formal settings. In most business and professional situations in many parts of the world, a more formal language register is expected. This means not only using formal modes of address and typical politeness formulas, but also watching out, if you are not speaking your native language, for keeping the formulation of “speech acts” (like greetings or leave-taking) in line with cultural norms. We often will instinctively translate word for word set phrases we use all the time, but that can sometimes cause miscommunication or awkwardness.