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LISTENING TO THE AIR

The document discusses the differences between high-context and low-context cultures, highlighting how communication styles are influenced by cultural backgrounds and shared histories. It emphasizes that high-context cultures, like Japan, rely on implicit messages and non-verbal cues, while low-context cultures, such as the United States, prioritize clear and explicit communication. The text also explores how education affects communication styles within these cultural contexts.

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Steven Alemán
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42 views

LISTENING TO THE AIR

The document discusses the differences between high-context and low-context cultures, highlighting how communication styles are influenced by cultural backgrounds and shared histories. It emphasizes that high-context cultures, like Japan, rely on implicit messages and non-verbal cues, while low-context cultures, such as the United States, prioritize clear and explicit communication. The text also explores how education affects communication styles within these cultural contexts.

Uploaded by

Steven Alemán
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Listening to the Air

Communicating Across Cultures


by Erin Meyer

“ In Japan, we implicitly learn, as we are growing up, to communicate


between the lines and to listen between the lines when others are
speaking. Communicating messages without saying them directly is a
deep part of our culture, so deep that we do it without even realizing it.
To give an example, every year in Japan there is a vote for the most
popular new word. A few years ago, the word of the year was “KY.” It
stands for kuuki yomenai, which means “one who cannot read the air”—
in other words, a person sorely lacking the ability to read between the
lines. In Japan if you can’t read the air, you are not a good listener”

“I learned the traditional American rule for successfully transferring a


powerful message to an audience: “Tell them what you are going to tell them,
then tell them, then tell them what you’ve told them. You speak to me as
clearly and explicitly as possible. Then I’ll repeat what I understood you to say
as clearly and explicitly as I can”.

Languages reflect the communication styles of the cultures that use those languages. For
example, Japanese and Hindi (as spoken in New Delhi) are both high-context languages, in
which a relatively high percentage of words can be interpreted multiple ways based on how
and when they are used. In Japanese, for instance, the word “ashi” means both “leg” and
“foot,” depending on context. Japanese also possesses countless homonyms, of which there
are only a few in English (“dear” and “deer,” for example). In Hindi the word “kal” means both
tomorrow and yesterday. You have to hear the whole sentence to understand in which
context it has been used. For this reason, when speaking Japanese or Hindi, you really do
have to “read the air” to understand the message.

The French language contains a number of idioms that specifically refer to high-context
communication. One is sous-entendu, literally meaning “under the heard.” To use a
sous-entendu basically means to say something without saying it. For example, if a man
says to his wife, “There are a lot of calories in that toffee ice cream you bought,” his
sous-entendu may be “You have gained some weight, so don’t eat this ice cream.” He has
not explicitly said that she is getting fat, but when he sees her reach down to throw a shoe at
him, he will know that she picked up his sous-entendu.

English, however, is a lower-context language than the Romance languages descended


from Latin (French, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese), while the Romance languages are
lower context than most Asian languages. However, a look at the Communicating scale and
its ranking of cultures from most explicit to most implicit shows that language is not the
whole story

The United States, thus, is the lowest-context culture in the world, and all Anglo- Saxon
cultures fall on the left-hand side of the scale, with the United Kingdom as the
highest-context culture of the Anglo-Saxon cluster. All the countries that speak Romance
languages, including European countries like Italy, Spain, and France, and Latin American
countries like Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina, fall to the middle right of the scale. Brazil is the
lowest-context culture in this cluster. Many African and Asian countries fall even further right.
Japan has the distinction of being the highest-context culture in the world.

As you can see, language only gives a partial indicator as to where a culture will fall on the
Communicating scale. The gap between the United States and the United Kingdom, both
Anglo-Saxon countries, is quite large, as is the gap between Brazil and Peru, both
Romance-language countries.

Beyond language, the history of a country strongly impacts its position on the
Communicating scale. For an example, just think for a minute about the histories of the two
bookend countries on the scale, the United States and Japan.

Imagine what happens when two people are married for fifty or sixty years. Having shared
the same context for so long, they can gather enormous amounts of information just by
looking at each other’s faces or gestures. Newlyweds, however, need to state their
messages explicitly and repeat them frequently to ensure they are received accurately.1 The
comparison to countries with longer or shorter shared histories is obvious.

High-context cultures tend to have a long shared history. Usually they are
relationship-oriented societies where networks of connections are passed on from
generation to generation, generating more shared context among community members.
Japan is an island society with a homogeneous population and thousands of years of shared
history, during a significant portion of which Japan was closed off from the rest of the world.
Over these thousands of years, people became particularly skilled at picking up each other’s
messages—reading the air, as Takaki said.
By contrast, the United States, a country with a mere few hundred years of shared history,
has been shaped by enormous inflows of immigrants from various countries around the
world, all with different histories, different languages, and different backgrounds. Because
they had little shared context, Americans learned quickly that if they wanted to pass a
message, they had to make it as explicit and clear as possible, with little room for ambiguity
and misunderstanding.

You may be considered a top-flight communicator in your home culture, but what works at
home may not work so well with people from other cultures.

One interesting quirk is that in high-context cultures, the more educated and sophisticated
you are, the greater your ability to both speak and listen with an understanding of implicit,
layered messages. By contrast, in low-context cultures, the most educated and sophisticated
people are those who communicate in a clear, explicit way.

The result is that the chairman of a French or Japanese company is likely to be a lot more
high-context than those who work on the shop floor of the same company, while the
chairman of an American or Australian organization is likely to be more low-context than
those with entry level jobs in the same organization. In this respect, education tends to move
individuals toward a more extreme version of the dominant cultural tendency.

Questions

1. What are the differences between “low context” and “high context” cultures? How do
those differences lead to misunderstandings and how can such misunderstandings be
mitigated? Use examples from the text.

2. Think about your own interactions with people from different cultures? Do the concepts
of “low context” and “high context” explain any miscommunications you’ve had? If so,
knowing what you know now, how would you approach similar interactions in the future?

3. What does it mean to be a good listener?

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