Crossing international divides: language and communication within international settings

Abstract

Feminists and postmodern thinkers have identified the importance of language in communicating with others and highlighted how language structures not only thinking but the ways in which individuals perceive and make sense of their world and subsequently use these understandings in their interactions with others. In other words, language is both a practice and a tool for practice. These writings focus primarily on the use of language amongst people of the same language group. They say little about how language structures communication across language groups, including situations in which people communicate with others who do not share a common language, or those who on account of the situations they work within, have to use a language other than their own to communicate in. It is important that social work practitioners and educators who work in international arenas, even if it is only to give a paper at an international conference, think about this issue and create strategies for more egalitarian forms of communication amongst people of different language groups as well as those within their own particular language group. In this article, I begin to address this issue and consider what guidelines might assist us in this task, because if we are unable to communicate with one another on the basis of equality, we will neither understand the meaning of global qualifying standards, the subject of this special edition of the Journal, nor how we might use or even challenge them and their relevance to a particular local situation.