Intercultural communication

The intercultural communication studies situations where people from

different parts of the world interact between each other. Apart from
languages, intercultural communication focuses on social attributes,
body language and the cultures of different groups of people. It also
involves understanding the different cultures around the globe,
languages and customs.
To begin with we are going to talk about cross-cultural
communication, a type of communication that involves an
understanding of how people from different backgrounds speak,
communicate, and perceive the world around them. First of all, you
have to understand that there are two different types of cultures, the
high-context cultures and the low-context cultures. The high-context
cultures are cultures such as Japanese, Arab, Greek or Spanish and
the low-context are the Swiss-German, German, Scandinavian and
American cultures in their respective order. Within these cultures
people can be either decisive, reflective or receptive. You can find
different styles of communication within each culture but in general in
each culture they tend more to one style. Decisive people are the
ones who are the first to speak, they use gesticulation widely, speak
loudly at times and normally the do not ask others their opinions, they
assume they will jump into the conversation. Then there are the
reflective ones, they speak after a short pause, if someone interrupts
them they will stop speaking and listen, they normally ask others their
opinion, smile and do not disagree. The third communication style is
the receptive, people that do not tend to verbally participate, they
listen and they use non-verbal signal to agree and to show interest.
To continue, we are going to talk about the non-verbal
communication, this is a style of communication through sending and
receiving wordless clues. Non- Verbal communication involves the
conscious and unconscious processes of encoding and decoding.
Encoding is the act of generating information such as facial
expressions, gestures and postures. Decoding is the interpretation of
information from received sensations from previous experiences.
There are four different types of personalities you can detect by how
people use their bodies, a braggart, a flirt, a wallflower and a
drunkard. The braggart is someone who proudly talks about
themselves or their achievements. A flirt is someone who is sexually
attracted to someone. The wallflower is a shy person, who is
frightened to involve them self and generally does not attract much
attention. And a drunkard, this is a person who drinks too much
alcohol.
There are different types of non verbal communication to express
something. There is the mirror technique, a behaviour in which a
person subconsciously imitates the gesture, speech pattern, or
attitude of another person. This concept often affects other individual

s notions about the individual that is exhibiting mirroring behaviours,

which can lead to the individual building rapport with others.
Gesticulation is also an important way of non-verbal communication.
The way someone use their hands to express themselves can say you
a lot of a person. There are other gestures that can describe how a
person is feeling, such as touching their hair, the way they cover their
vital organs or were their hands are, crossed, in their pockets or
rubbing their noses. Handshake is also an important figure to have in
mind. It is an instrument of the exchange of information it can show
rank, position or intentions. The direct eye contact, smile or repetition
of the receivers name also influence what people think about your
person. In general, hands are always sincere, reveal desires, show
feeling and tell the mood of the other person. The face you are using
also is going to tell something about you. You can show different
moods with your face such as being happy, bored, wom-out or tired.
In addition, the time issue is also very different around the world.
There are rigid-time cultures and flexible-time cultures. The rigid-time
cultures usually make sure to understand their colleagues
expectations and priorities, clearly explain how these expectations fit
or conflict with your circumstances, give frequent status reports and
always are sure to notify any delay. In the other hand, flexible-time
cultures allow you to give your input on setting the deadline, keep in
close contact with your associates and if you have a long-term
trusting relationship will encourage a two-way flow information thus
avoiding conflict. There are also task and relationship orientated
cultures. The task-orientated cultures, look to get things done,
transactions take precedence over personalities and negotiations
techniques deploys to hammer out details. Relationship-orientated
cultures are people who want to understand what you are by
determining whether you are good or bad for their interest. They
consciously work at building up a relationship so that you create a
trustworthy partnership to honour the agreement