Intercultural Communications Evolution of New

Intercultural CommunicationS

Evolution of New Multicultural Identities:

As societies become more multicultural, new concepts of cultural identity evolve whenever assimilated immigrant groups congregate in specific regions and local neighborhoods. This phenomenon is a natural function of combining traditional cultural practices with local American customs as well as those of local communities. Over time, substantially different cultural components may evolve, even among people who originally shared the same heritage before emigrating to new countries. It is not unheard of for immigrant communities to form different communities in a new host country, purposefully, or to bring with them intercultural prejudice or antagonism that originated in their respective countries of origin. Many Chinese-

Americans and Philippine-Americans retain a certain amount of uneasiness around Japanese-Americans, even though very few of them were even alive during World War II when Japan invaded their countries and brutalized their ancestors

Finally, even within a single culture, multicultural differences evolve between groups that have already been assimilated for one or two generations and contemporary (first-generation) immigrants. In many Asian-American communities, for just one example, there are substantial differences between Asians who were born in the United States and first-generation Asian-Americans. In many Asian-American communities, second and third-generation Asian-Americans refer to themselves as "ABCs" for "American born Asians," and to "first-generation Asian-Americans as "FOBs" for "fresh off the boat."

2. Untranslatable Vocabulary and Idiomatic Expressions:

All human beings are hard wired for spoken language in the in sense that our developing brains absorb new language skills in childhood and in the sense that in infancy, we naturally mimic parts of speech even before we understand the language.

However, the languages that actually evolved in different parts of the world differ substantially, partly as a function of the natural environment.

As a result, certain concepts routinely expressed in one language may have no comparable translation in others. The English language, for example, has several different words for snow, such as "snow," "sleet," and "hail," for precipitation, and "slush," to describe melted, partly liquefied snow

Skiers and snowboarders may add several more terms, such as "hard pack" and "soft pack" to denote different types of snow that have particular relevance to them. However, Eskimo languages may have dozens of different words for snow that are not directly translatable into English. The Inuit have specific words for fresh snow with ice cover, fresh snow on the ground, old snow on the ground, thin ice, thin ice floating at sea, and smooth ice on the ground, none of which translates directly into English, except by description. Likewise, African and Mediterranean languages may have as many different variations of the word for sand as the Inuit have for snow that do not translate into English, because in English, "sand," "mud," "mulch," and "gravel" represent the only types of sand for which English has a specific word.

In addition to vocabulary shaped by environment, different languages also develop arbitrary differences in idiomatic expression. For just one example, modern Hebrew has a word pronounced "dafkuh" that does not translate directly into English. It is used to denote "just at that time," or "exactly that person," or "that very day" in a manner that suggests either irony, coincidence, misfortune, or even sarcasm, in the following manner: "I knew someone who died in the 9/11 terrorist attack; he had a job interview in the World Trade Center dafkuh on that day.."

3. International English in Intercultural Communications:

Native speakers of English routinely use phrases that have evolved in American culture or even in different regions of the country. While doing so is perfectly natural, it may interfere with the ability to communicate clearly with someone who learned English as a second language rather than through using the language in the United States. Some very simple examples of regional differences include variations of the word used for carbonated beverages: in the Northeast, one asks for a "soda" whereas in the Midwest, one would ask for a "pop." Other times, popular usage drives the evolution of words from untraditional origin, such as the word "zerox" used either as a verb or noun equivalent of "photocopy." A non-native English speaker may not understand what "zerox" means. Despite the fact that, in the United States, it might be more common than the word it has largely replaced.