Bu siness skills: b et ter me etings 1 — 21 business englisch bu sin es s e n g L is

28 
Business Spotlight
1/2021
COMMUNICATION
CULTURE COMMENT
Getting it right —
the importance of
appropriateness 
Kommunikation im eigenen Land und in der eigenen Sprache 
funktioniert gewöhnlich ohne größere Probleme. Um aber im 
interkulturellen Umfeld effizient zu verlaufen, muss vor allem 
auch die Sprache angemessen sein.
Von PETER FRANKLIN
ADVANCED
PLUS 
I
had been entertaining some business 
guests from Europe at a restaurant in 
Beijing that was not much frequented by 
Westerners. The meal was coming to an 
end and, starting the process of paying, I ex-
plained in my almost non-existent Mandarin, 
some English and in sign language that I need-
ed a receipted invoice. 
To help the waiter understand, I took out a 
notebook and wrote “INVOICE”. Thinking 
that this term was rather too technical, I added 
the word “BILL”. The waiter seemed to under-
stand my wishes and returned some time later 
bearing an envelope addressed to “Bill Invoice”. 
Somehow, I hadn’t got it quite right.
“Doing communication” in one’s own coun-
try is generally relatively easy. We know with 
increasing experience the unspoken rules for 
getting a message across in the right way. But 
communicating appropriately in an intercul-
tural situation is much more difficult. Yet, it is 
an essential feature of successful intercultural 
interaction. 
Effectiveness — that is, achieving the right 
result, the other distinguishing feature of suc-
cessful intercultural interaction that scholars 
agree on — is relatively easy. But it may come 
at the price of friction, conflict and/or collateral 
damage to the relationship if 
appropriateness 
is lacking.
“Linguistic accommodation” is something 
that we do all the time — and generally uncon-
sciously — when we are in our home setting 
and using our first language. We adjust our 
linguistic default setting to what we sense is 
appropriate for the particular person we are 
communicating with and the particular situ-
ation in which we find ourselves. We may be 
personal or impersonal, formal or more infor-
mal. We may use simpler language when talk-
ing to children or technical language when we 
are talking with colleagues. We slip effortlessly 
into the appropriate gear. 
But when we communicate in a lingua fran-
ca — a language that is a second language to at 
least one of the interlocutors — this linguistic 
accommodation needs to be more conscious. 
The late (and great) US intercultural com-
munication scholar William B. Gudykunst 
wrote that, when communicating across cul-
tures, we necessarily pay more attention to the 
act of communicating. “Our focus, however, is 
usually on the outcome,” he says, “rather than 
the process of communication. For effective 
communication to occur, we must focus on the 
process of our communication with strangers.” 
Communicating in the right and appropri-
ate way is more likely to lead to the right result 
— probably in all settings, but especially when 
we don’t share a culture or a language with our