Intercultural Communication

Dionne had a dozen items or so in her cart and as she moved up in line and started placing them on the counter Linda greeted her--without smiling--in a flat, harsh-sounding voice, saying "How are you today?" Mrs. Carter smiled at her and softly said "Just fine." Half of the way through scanning the items Linda came to a carton of Diet Coke. She slapped her hand down on it and said "You need two of these." Clearly Dionne did not hear her well enough. She was writing a check and looked up as though she was startled and confused. Linda repeated, a bit louder, "You need two of these" and Dionne replied "No, one's fine for now."

But Linda persisted and said, "Two, much better. I put two for you," while gesturing toward the cash register. This left Mrs. Carter with nothing to say except to repeat herself. But Linda said again, whi

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a was a member of a co-culture. She was either an immigrant or someone who had grown up within a co-culture speaking primarily her family's first language. The problem of intercultural communication that arose in the situation was, however, only partly due to Linda's abilities with word selection and accent in English. Hall's (1973) concept of sets is important here. The individual may learn a large number of those groups of things (words) that are set apart in particular ways. But, on the one hand, s/he many know the words "but still use the linguistic isolates of his [or her] mother tongue--which gives him [or her] an accent" (Hall, p. 106). And, on the other hand, s/he may use the constructions of the first language, which tends to make communications unintelligible or, at least, difficult to figure out. In Linda's case linguistic factors were important, but they were not the whole story. She could have said, for example, "You may want to get two today" and employed the word "sale" or the phrase "two-for-one" to get her point across. The remark that Mrs. Carter "need[ed]" two cartons was somewhat misleading since it seemed to address how much Diet Coke she was going to drink and, understandably, this confused Mrs. Car
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Some common words found in the essay are:
Diet Coke, Samovar Porter, English Hall's, Carter African-American, Dionne Americans, , Dionne Carter, Carter Linda, Americans Linda's, Yes Ring, diet coke, samovar porter, intercultural communication, carton diet coke, tone voice, response carter, checker-customer interaction, carter finally, achieve congruence, communication people, response carter finally, samovar porter 2001, american co-cultures,
Approximate Word count = 1611
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)

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