Sociocultural stereotypes in cross-cultural communication

Abstract

The relationship between language and culture has long been the subject of fierce debates among philosophers, linguists and social scientists. In spite of Chomsky’s theory about an innate biological basis for language and Steven Pinker’s concept of language instinct, language use, however, is social, so the idea of a biological language instinct seems to be controversial from the perspective of sociolinguistics. The concept of “linguistic worldview” refers to the cognitive function of language. Human beings have the ability to communicate with one another by means of a system of conventional signs, which refers to classes of phenomena in an extra-linguistic reality. Thus, a certain cognitive view of the world, its categorisation and conceptualisation of the identified phenomena are encoded in the human mind. People who identify themselves as members of a social group acquire common ways of viewing the world through their interactions with other members of that same group. Common attitudes, beliefs and values are reflected in the way all members of the group use language, i.e. what they choose to say or not to say and how they say it. The view of the world, established in a language, is not identical to any encyclopaedic knowledge of the world. The present paper is a general overview of stereotypes as part and parcel of the linguistic worldview that influence on cross-cultural communication. Most definitions characterize a stereotype as a schematic, standardized, constant, conventional, nationally dependant phenomenon and the last feature is especially important for cross-cultural communication. Some claim that stereotypes can cause problems in cross-cultural communication as they concentrate on generalized simplified perceptions about a certain nation. Others consider that stereotypes can play a positive role in cross-cultural communication since they help people to acquire basic knowledge about another nation. The ongoing cultural globalization, however, determines certain changes in the principles of interaction of different types of intertextual encyclopediae and reveals the necessity to reconsider the kind of cultural and sociological competence required nowadays. The author hypothesized that stereotypes of consciousness, being psychological phenomena, correlate with sociolinguistic phenomena — language cliches, linguistic specific words and expressions that manifest themselves in communication through different associations. The experiment conducted in Russia and in Italy among bilinguals clearly showed the dominance in the communicative behavior of native encyclopedic code that may be the main cause of misunderstanding in cross-icultural communication.