Historic Overview of Intercultural Communication

Intercultural communication as a field of study was acknowledged after World War II. Several centuries ago the world seemed small, and most people only communicated with others much like themselves. The typical villager in Medieval Europe seldom traveled as far as the nearby market town. There were no strangers in the village.

Over the years, improved transportation brought wider travel, newer means of communication allowed information exchange over longer distances. Today, improved technologies of communication (like the Internet) and more rapid means of transportation have increased the likelihood of intercultural communication. Trade and travel brought strangers into face-to-face contact. So did invasion, warfare, and colonization.

For the proper name of the field "Intercultural Communication" credit is often given to American anthropologist Edward T. Hall, who used it for the first time in his book The Silent Language in 1959. The book is sometimes called "the field's founding document" (Hart 1998).

Prior to publishing the book, Hall was a staff member at the Foreign Service Institute, USA (1951-1955), where he, together with his colleagues, worked out what can be called the first original paradigm for Intercultural Communication:

Main elements of Hall's paradigm for Intercultural Communication were:

· systematic empirical study and the classification of nonverbal communication (defined as communication that does not involve the exchange of words)

· emphasis, especially in nonverbal communication, on the out-of-conscious level of information-exchange

· focus on intercultural communication, not as earlier on macrolevel monocultural studies

· a non-judgmental view toward and acceptance of cultural differences

· participatory training methods in Intercultural Communication.

The beginning of Intercultural Communication was for applied purposes rather than for theoretical considerations: Training was the main issue. The first target audience comprised American diplomats and development personnel whose intercultural skills had to be improved. From the Foreign Service Institute, Intercultural Communication teaching and training spread to the universities and other organizations. University courses were given and academic textbooks in Intercultural Communication started to appear in the USA in a larger scale in the 1970s. In Europe, the first university courses in Intercultural Communication took place in the 1980s. From the earlier, more applied focus on teaching and training, Intercultural Communication has in the recent decades developed and matured also as an academic field with its own theory building.

For many people, the sheer joy of learning about other cultures is sufficient reason to study intercultural communication. They are curious about how different worldviews affect communication and human understanding. People who consider their own culture as the only culture often feel that they do not need to study how others see the world. They presume that everyone sees the world pretty much as they do, or they are ethnocentric, judging other cultures as inferior to their own culture. A few people are even xenophobic, fearing that which is foreign, strange, and different.

Many of us perceive the world through the eyes of a single culture, surrounded by other people with similar views. We attempt to move away from that monocultural viewpoint. The ability to see the world from different points of view is fundamental to the process of becoming intercultural. While students can study intercultural communication from their own single point of view, they will not learn or retain as much as students who are aware of multiple perspectives. This is not to say that the student’s existing point of view is wrong and another one is right. Rather, it is to suggest that there are different ways of thinking and that such differences must be recognized and respected.

Intercultural Communication is the exchange of information between individuals who are unlike culturally. This definition implies that two or more individuals may be unlike in their national culture, ethnicity, age, gender, or in other ways that affect their interaction.

Their dissimilarity means that effective communication between them is particularly difficult. The cultural unlikeness of the individuals who interact is the unique aspect of intercultural communication. One type of difference occurs when the two or more participants in a communication situation each have a different national culture.

If the two communication participants differ in age, – one individual is a teenager and the other is a parent, the younger person has been socialized into a somewhat different culture than the adult. For example, while discussing rap music, which the parent regards as just loud noise and inferior to classical music. The teenager feels that rap is a meaningful expression of contemporary culture. This information exchange among individuals who differ in age also is intercultural communication because the teenager and the parent have somewhat different cultures. Similarly, information exchange between individuals who differ in religion, ethnicity, disability status, health, or in other characteristics can be affected by their cultural or subcultural differences.