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6. The most important barriers to communication which might impede cooperation between representatives of various cultures

LANGUAGE There are many aspects of language that may pose intercultural problems such as phonology, morphology, semantics, syntactics or pragmatics.

The language that describes what we want to say in our terms may present barriers to others who are not familiar with our expressions, buzz-words and jargon.

. Most importantly, the knowledge of language may be different among speakers. Barriers also exist because words can be interpreted in more than one way that’s why the receiver may decode the message in a completely different way that was intended.

Words as the sender understands them are combined with the perception of those words by the receiver.

STEREOTYPES Stereotyping causes us to typify a person, group, an even or thing on the basis of oversimplified conceptions, beliefs or opinions.

. Stereotyping is a barrier to communication as it causes people to act as if they already knew the message that is coming from the sender or as if no message was necessary because “everyone already knows”.

”. Often before starting a talk we already assume that the interlocutor will behave this or that way.

We are less open minded and our judgement and decoding of a message is greatly influenced by what we think about the person on the basis of a stereotype.

• individual characteristics ignored • lead to prejudices • unsupported judgement

GESTURES/BODY LANGUAGE Gestures may differ between cultures so they may be interpreted wrongly and lead to misunderstandings.

In one culture for example a direct eye contact is perceived as totally normal behaviour while in other cultures like Japan it is seen as offensive

Attitude to the expressiveness of gestures is also different.

Some cultures express emotions openly while others restrain them, therefore when such cultures meet their communication is strongly influenced by their gestures and body language (variation in cross-cultural interpretation of gestures