Culture as Communication: Communication Style across and within Cultures
Culture as Communication: Communication Style across and within Cultures

Summary/Abstract: Culture can be conceptualized in various ways, but it is first and foremost communication, as noted by Edward T. Hall, the American anthropologist. This article sets out to demonstrate the need for flexible conceptualization in the area of intercultural studies starting from Hall’s nuanced classification of cultures as predominantly “high-context” or “low-context” according to their prevalent communication styles. It looks at a few diverging communicative tendencies in American English, a language that although generally considered a classic example of “low-context” directness, still resorts to oblique, euphemistic expression. Such contradictions as the one between the verbal glorification of the ordinary or the use of euphemism, on the one hand, and informal bluntness on the other, which can be traced either to certain socio-cultural aspects of 19th-century American frontier life, or even further back to the Puritan spirit of early colonists, illustrate the elusiveness of culture, and therefore the impossibility of strict cultural labelling.

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