The importance of language for cultural understanding in business and tourism

The Importance of Language in Understanding Culture
Introduction
One of the lesser known, but important, programs of the United Nations is to promote the preservation of the world's languages. The UNDESA has incorporated language into sustainability standards, in particular concerned about the preservation of the world's languages that are most at risk. Language, the group argues, represents a way of thinking for a people (UNDESA, 2016). By that logic, it is essential to understanding a culture to understand its language. Culture is incredibly complex, and it can be impossible to fully understand a culture without immersion in it. But without immersion, learning more about a culture can facilitate mutual understanding, it can facilitate commerce, and it can allow for knowledge to be transferred from one culture to another. If each culture is viewed as a source of knowledge, then the vocabularies of each culture can be seen as a window to the collective knowledge of humanity.
For business, or just for any cultural interaction, knowing the language can be an important means by which understanding is cultivated. First, as noted above, language is a window into a culture, because culture has shaped the way that the language develops over time. But language also facilitates the transfer of knowledge and understanding in a way that few other cultural artifacts can. There is a role for things like music and art, but language remains a highly critical dimension along which culture, and therefore knowledge can be transmitted. This paper will examine the role that language plays in helping us to understand culture, and the value that can have for anybody engaged in cultural interaction, both recreational and business.
Language as a Culture Carrier
During the age of colonization, many if not most colonizers sought to attack elements of a local culture that were not aligned with colonial interests. Religion was always a popular target, but so, too, was language. Some actions taken to suppress local languages were deliberate, while in other cases languages were put under stress in more hegemonic ways – people would have to learn the colonizers' languages in order to have opportunities to thrive in the colonial society. With colonizers holding the keys to power in the area, the value of the local language for any sort of success or access to opportunity diminished, leading to decline over successive generations. Brandist (2015) discusses the hegemonic policies under Tsarist Russia and the Soviet Union, both of which used passive and active forms of hegemony to reduce the incidence of local languages throughout the Russian and Soviet empires. Many local languages have survived, but even then, in altered form, such as through the use of Cyrillic notations developed by Soviet bureaucrats.
As a window into culture, this makes for a fascinating study. In the post-Soviet world, many minority languages have reverted to scripts more common for their language groups. If one travels in the former stans today, one finds that Uzbekistan has switched to Latin script for its Turkic language, reflected a cultural desire to pivot towards Turkey's sphere of influence. Tajikistan, with its Persian language, has switched to the Farsi script. In Kyrgyzstan, the local language is still written in Cyrillic, despite being a Turkic language, because that country's ties are still closer to Russia than to Turkey.
Jiang (2000) argues that language is a mirror of culture. In order to understand a culture, he argues, one must understand the language, because the language is an essential tool by which hone can traverse a culture. The culture and the underlying logic of the language become intertwined. He points to similar words that have both the same general meaning and quite different specific meanings. Lunch in English and Chinese, for example, mean the same thing in terms of a midday meal, but what a midday meal is varies significantly for speakers of those languages. The word "dog" means the same animal, but what that animal means is quite different to most English and Chinese-language speakers. A truer understanding of those words, to those two broad cultural groups, would require a more in-depth understanding of the languages.
The reality of the underlying context of even common words highlights the challenges faced when translating languages, as Nida (1998) points out. Language needs culture in order to have meaning. An interesting observation Nida makes is that culture often changes more quickly than language, which means that in some cases a word's meaning has both syntagmatic and cultural contexts (Nida, 1998). Think of how one's grandparents use certain words that had different meanings or levels of social acceptability in their times, but seem dated in that usage now, even though the speaker is still living.
That meanings can be in a state of flux creates an imperative to learn language in order to understand culture. It may be simple to do a verbatim translation using technology now, but without context the translation could provide a very poor understanding, compared with actually knowing the language. The challenge, of course, is that possession of a superficial level of knowledge is insufficient to truly understand a culture, and may even due harm to understanding, in that someone with a little knowledge of a subject often feels that they know more than they do; only when you acquire greater knowledge do you start to comprehend just how little you really know. Like the person who travels to Europe one summer, and comes back thinking they are worldly.
Montasser (2015) examined the complex links between language and culture. Writing about the merits of teaching culture along with language when teaching English in the Arab world, two things stand out. First, some culture is going to be inherently conveyed regardless of whether it is explicitly taught. But with English being a global lingua franca, it is possible to teach English in primarily a transactional way, conveying little culture beyond legal and business concepts. This discussion veers into whether or not teaching other cultures inherently damages Arab identity, as may be happening in other parts of the world where English is taking over organically from smaller local languages.
But the thought raises another issue – how does one teach "English" culture, given how many different cultures use English as a first language. Does such a thing exist? Native English speakers actually get a window into these cultures when the learn the differences between different Englishes. The complex relationship between England and Scotland is revealed in the ways that the Scots language finds its way into the nation's English. Canada uses a mix of English and American spellings, highlighting dual linguistic influences on what is in theory a homogenous cultural group.
Language in Business
One of more interesting aspects of language as a culture is its use in business. For as long as different cultures have done business together, business communication has relied on transactional meeting of the minds. In many cases, this is done via a dominant language, but in many situations a lingua franca would emerge to play the role of the business language. The Chinook jargon of the northwest coast of North America is a good example, being able to unite people of many different cultures with basic words with which simple transactions could be conducted. In multilingual nations today, the colonial language is often considered to have less baggage that selecting a dominant local language, and thus English, French, Spanish and Portuguese are common business languages around the world, simply as a means of de-politicizing business transactions –even in India, English is a more viable business language than Hindi, because the nation's non-Hindu communities reject connotations of Hindu nationalism that are embedded in widespread use of Hindi.
What has changed in recent years is that not all business between cultures is transactional in nature. Simple language gets the job done when negotiating prices and quantities, but when a company wishes to serve the entire world, it takes more than that, and in multiple different ways. First, multinational companies wish to do business all over the world. A company selling consumer products has to have a high level of cultural knowledge in order to sell effectively in a foreign country. The business world has moved far past the Chevy Nova in Mexico-type stories, but only after making such mistakes in the first place. Marketers at the very least need to be immersed in a local culture and that typically means linguistic natives are required, or at least preferred.
Beyond that, some particular challenges can be best addressed by people from certain cultures. Understanding how a language works, and the influence it has on culture, can be key to understanding why certain countries produce a lot of artists, and others a lot of software engineers. Doing business around the world means there is opportunity to recruit around the world, and that means understanding culture becomes important.
Teaching Culture as a Means of Teaching Language
It seems that most researchers agree that language and culture influence each other. Culture underpins language, and language can in turn shape a culture. In many cases, it doesn't matter which came first, just that a phenomenon exists. When English speakers today debate the merits of newly-developed gender neutral pronouns, Finns have always used hän, and in fact a Finn learning English will often confuse 'he' and 'she' because those concepts do not exist the same way in their language. Seelye (1984) argued that culture is so important to language that language cannot fully be learned without understanding the culture behind it. It stands to reason, then, that focusing on culture can play a huge role in furthering language understanding.
Seelye makes the point that this is sometimes because the things that we might find confusing about a language have cultural roots, and understanding those roots can help us get past blockages in language understanding. Further, one might have greater empathy and sympathy for a culture that seems confusing, if the language is better understood. This thought in particular has implications for both tourists and for doing business in foreign countries – Google translate does not get the job done for understanding foreign markets, or people encountered when traveling.
Implications for Travel
Tourists often visit countries without learning much if any of the local language. The tourism industry is typically set up in any given locality with local people having language skills aligned with the tourists they receive. A city that receives Russian and Mexican tourists will have a tourism industry with Spanish and Russian speakers. This is why any place with a lot of American visitors will have hotels with English-speaking staff, restaurants with English menus and the like.
This reality, however, also means that the experience most tourists receive is not nearly as immersive as might be optimal. One can see local buildings, flora and fauna, but will be cut off from many other aspects of the local culture. To this day, there are cultural shows – kitschy song and dance routines set up for the benefit of tourists, that often present a superficial version of a culture, one stripped of most of its context and all of its meaning. Connecting with locals when you don't speak the language is inherently transactional in nature, unless they happen to speak your language. An American can learn more about a local culture traveling to a different part of the United States than to a foreign country, simply because of the ability to communicate with the locals.
There are pragmatic considerations of course. When one spends the summer backpacking around Europe, it can be difficult to acquire even a superficial understanding of ten different languages. You aren't going to learn how to read Greek just to visit Athens and Santorini – and you don't need to. Only when you travel in depth is there any cause or reason to dig deeper into language. Given how difficult it is to learn language, and even more difficult to truly understand a culture, the return on investment simply isn't there given the schedule at which most people travel.
This does not mean that learning a language and culture ahead of time isn't valuable; it is. Just that it is not necessarily pragmatic to do so. And one's in-depth mastery of Italian language and culture is not really going to enrich their experience elbowing out the hordes at the Uffizi Gallery. But where there are opportunities for travelers to truly immerse themselves, they do a disservice to themselves to fail to acquire local language skills, and take advantage of learning the culture. If a student goes on exchange, for example, that provides an opportunity to step into another world, and spending an entire semester hanging out with other foreign students would be a squandering of that opportunity.
Implications for Business
The implications for business are probably even more profound. One of the things that differentiates a business from a person is the length of its existence. A person might travel to China, but a business that sets up a subsidiary there intends to stay for a long time, even if no individual employee does. Thus, there is an imperative to build a certain level of cultural competency in any country where a company wishes to do any amount of business beyond the basics. Language is just part of that – people who speak the language often come from the culture and can serve as cultural translators, if not linguistic ones as well.
There is an extensive body of literature about intercultural communication in business. Even before the modern age of globalization, the importance of intercultural competence in communication was studied and understood. Beamer (1992) notes that the ability to encode and decode meanings is a critical aspect of doing business, and can be broken down into a number of different activities. For businesses, being able to communicate with employees and customers is essential.
From an internal perspective, a company's employees are its representatives, and often they need to have bicultural fluency when the company is foreign. For example, the organization will set internal norms of culture and communication, and in some cases might be beholden to its domestic laws even in foreign countries (such as the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act). This necessitates the ability to translate these norms from the home culture to the foreign subsidiary, as one cannot assume norms are the same everywhere. It is important for the senior management to realize that differences can be major, or they can be subtle. Shifts in language are required even when speaking to different audiences – marketers should not emails for an English audience the same way they would for an American one, because of differences in directness and salesyness.
From the external perspective, creating interest and demand for a product is essential. Awareness is really about the size of the megaphone that the company uses, but stimulating demand goes beyond awareness; you have to tap into something emotional in most cases, unless dealing with a hyperrational culture. What this means for a business is that it needs to have a very high level of cultural competence in order to succeed. Think about how badly Target flopped when it went to Canada – it assumed it could just duplicate what it does at home in another country, but even a similar country is not an identical country.
All the research suggests the critical link between language and culture. Thus, whether a company wants to sell product or motivate employees, it needs to be able to tap into a culture, in order to meet its objectives. That can really only be accomplished through a deeper-level understanding of culture that goes beyond the transaction. What the research shows is that language is one of the most critical things to understand in order to go that deep. A business will need to have people who understand a language, and that can help it to unlock the culture.
The language speakers do not necessarily have to be from that culture – but they need strong enough skills to adapt. You can send an American executive to Australia and the common language will be enough that the American can figure out the subtle differences between the cultures (and languages) easily enough. The same can be said for a member of an expatriate community. A Korean-American may not be fully fluent in the language and culture of Seoul, but has enough of a starting point that the details can be filled in later, and much more quickly than by someone who knows nothing about Korean language and culture. These examples show that language is absolutely essential in breaking down the barriers between cultures that exist, and the benefits to business are legion.
Conclusions
There is a vast body of research that showcases the links between language and culture. Language is a door or a window into deeper cultural understanding, which can help an American business overseas, or a tourist visiting another country. Culture also influences language, which has certain implications for working in different cultures that speak the same language – like why you write differently for English people compared to Americans. In order to properly prepare either oneself or one's company to go international, it is important to understand how these links work.
By knowing how language and culture influence each other, it is easier to gain empathy and understanding when dealing with people from other cultures. This is important, for example, when traveling and you talk to people who find English to be very challenging. If you understand that because of its history English has two words for almost everything (think "waterfall" and "cascade" as German and French-derived words for the same thing), and most languages don't have that, that's why a lot of people struggle with English. Every language has things that make sense to a foreigner, and those might be points of cultural intersection, where the things you find weird about a foreign language, such as gendered nouns, hint at areas of cultural divergence.
US businesses are faced with significant challenges when doing business overseas, because they are often monolingual and monocultural. The size of the domestic market is such that US companies often fail to develop cultural competence fast enough, or downplay its importance. But the reality is that having language skills at their disposal is enough for an American company to begin to unlock the cultures of the places in which they want to do business, allowing them greater opportunity to market products and services, and greater ability to motivate employees to achieve stronger results. Language competency and cultural competency are interconnected, meaning that if cultural competency is a prerequisite for international business success, or a more enjoyable trip, then it stands that language competency is also a requirement for these things.
References
Beamer, L. (1992) Learning intercultural communication competence. International Journal of Business Communication. Vol. 29 (3)
Brandist, C. (2015) The dimensions of hegemony: Language, culture and politics in revolutionary Russia. Brill. Leiden, NL.
Jiang (2000) The relationship between culture and language. ELT Journal. Vol. 54 (4) 328-334.
Montasser, M. (2015) Culture and English language teaching in the Arab world. Adult Learning Vol. 26 (2) 66-72.
Nida, E. (1998) Language, culture, and translation. Journal of Foreign Languages. Vol. 115 (3) 29-33.
Seelye, N. (1984) Teaching culture, strategies for intercultural communication. National Textbook Company, Lincolnwood, IL.
UNDESA (2016) Protecting languages, preserving cultures. United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs. Retrieved December 7, 2018 from https://www.un.org/development/desa/en/news/social/preserving-indigenous-languages.html