Cross- cultural Communication This page intentionally left blank

Language and thought
The first academic cultural studies were carried out by anthropologists in the 
mid- nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and were centred in the USA 
on the Native Americans. They wanted to understand the cultures of the 
rapidly disappearing Native-American tribes and, in particular, the study of 
their languages. They attempted to answer the question ‘which came first, 
language or thought?’. Was it the cultural features which then gave rise to 
the language needed to express them or did the language itself condition 
how people thought about their society? If the language came first, did 
that limit how people thought about their society? Briefly summarized, the 
debate is whether language determines what we experience and how we see 
the world or whether our experience of the world determines how we think 
about it and how we then express it.
There has been much debate as to which comes first, that is, language or 
thought. This debate was continued by the American linguists and anthro-
pologists Edward Sapir and his pupil Benjamin- Lee Whorf, who also had a 
special interest in American- Indian languages. They developed the Sapir-
Whorf Hypothesis, which was based on linguistic determinism, in other 
words the proposition that language determines the way we think and 
speak. Sapir emphasized that the real world is, to a large extent, built upon 
the language habits of the group. We see, hear and otherwise experience as 
we do because of the language habits of our community, which predispose 
us towards certain choices of interpretation.
The cultural anthropologist and ethnologist Franz Boas established the 
link between language and behaviour from his studies of native American 
communities. He concluded that: ‘The peculiar characteristics of languages 
are clearly reflected in the views and customs of the people of the world’ 
(Boas, 1938: 31). He maintained that it was necessary to view the world 
around us through the eyes of other cultures if we really wanted to under-
stand it.
However, Noam Chomsky (1975) supports the existence of linguistic uni-
versals (universal grammar), but rejects the existence of cultural universals. 
Chomsky is supported by Steven Pinker, who resists the idea that language 
shapes thought.
Modern linguists tend to put the emphasis on the potential for thinking 
to be influenced rather than unavoidably determined by language. The 
American researcher Lena Boroditsky (2001) also criticizes the polarization 
of thought which leads to thinking that one feature influences the other. She 

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4 Cross-Cultural Communication
maintains that there is a symbiotic relationship between language and the 
way we think about culture, with each constantly influencing the other.
In the language versus culture debate, it is clear that sharing a language 
implies sharing a culture; for example, in Belgium, where Flemish and 
French are the main shared languages, the scores of the Flemish and French-
speaking regions are on Hofstede’s four dimensions of culture (see Chapter 2) 
very similar to each other, but different from those of the Netherlands.
Without knowing the language well, one misses a lot of the subtleties 
of a culture, for example, humour, and one is forced to remain a relative 
outsider. Therefore, in the cross- cultural encounter, experienced travellers 
recognize that it is prudent to avoid jokes and irony until they are sure of 
the other culture’s perception of what represents acceptable humour: ‘The 
essence of effective
cross- cultural communication has more to do with 
releasing the right responses than sending the right message’ (Hall and 
Hall, 1990: 4).