Wierzbicka, Anna (2010). Cross-cultural communication and miscommunication: The role of cultural keywords. Intercultural Pragmatics, 7(1), 1-23. DOI: 10.1515/IPRG.2010.001
The experience of immigrants and other people who live transcultural lives confirms that different societies and lingua-cultures have different tacit norms for interpersonal communication and that such differences matter a great deal in many people’s lives. Every lingua-culture inherits and transmits historically and culturally shaped ways of thinking. This applies to English-speaking societies no less than to any other. Given the massive scale of past and ongoing immigration to English-speaking countries as well as the growing domination of English in the global world, it is particularly important to recognize that English, too, is saturated with historically transmitted cultural assumptions. But it is above all “Anglo English” – the common core of the ‘‘Englishes of the inner circle’’ – that tends to be mistaken for a culture-neutral medium of communication. As a result, “Anglo English”, which greatly facilitates cross-cultural communication in today’s world, is also a major source of miscommunication and cross-cultural failure.
This paper takes as its starting point one of the most illuminating cross-cultural novels, Nabokov’s Pnin. The author surveys a number of ‘‘anomalies’’ in ‘‘Pninian English’’ that had an impact on Pnin’s life in America. Then the paper moves beyond Pnin, but stays with Nabokov, and explores one area of immigrant linguistic condition: the loss of cultural key words. The focus is in particular on the Russian key cultural concept of судьба sud’ba and on Nabokov’s continued reliance on this concept in his books created, through the English medium, by his post-Russian authorial self. The author’s overall purpose, however, is not to talk about Nabokov, but to illuminate the immigrant condition and the miscommunication inherent in cross-cultural communication. In her analysis, she relies on the ‘NSM’ methodology of semantic analysis, which allows us to analyse intercultural communication and miscommunication from a neutral, non-Anglocentric perspective.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
