Six Common Misunderstandings You Need to Avoid When Dealing with Language Diversity - Part 1

Communication is the process by which we exchange ideas and thoughts in a way that can be understood by others. 

Needless to say, effective communication in a multicultural setting can be very challenging. 

If you are a native speaker, you may worry if your international workers understood your instructions. Or you may have difficulty explaining new procedures to newly-arrived immigrants. You may also wonder if crucial details of an upcoming project are being understood. 

Non-native speakers, on the other hand, have a different set of concerns. 

As new customers, they may not ask important questions about a product or a needed service for fear of not understanding the answer. 

As new hires, they may hesitate to speak up in a meeting worrying that colleagues will not understand their accent. 

There is also the concern that others will equate their accent with lack of proficiency. 

In multicultural workplaces, there can be a lot of misconceptions regarding those who did not grow up speaking the language. In this newsletter, I will address the first three. 

Common Misconceptions to Avoid When Communicating Across Differences

Dr. Sondra Thiederman brilliantly highlighted these misconceptions in her book, Managing a Diverse Workforce. Below are some of the highlights. 

Misconception 1:

A heavy accent equates to lack of language proficiency.

While this may be true for some individuals, in most cases, the way the words are being pronounced has nothing to do with language proficiency.

It is also important to consider that some of the sounds in the English language do not exist in other languages, which makes them much harder to adopt.

Native speakers of Portuguese, for example, often struggle with the correct pronunciation of the English “interdentals” such as those found in this, that, those.

Japanese speakers do not distinguish between R and L. Imagine their struggle pronouncing a work like “parallel.”

Next time you hear someone speaking with an accent, the first thing that should go through your mind is that that person is at least bilingual. In this global economy, I would say this would be a tremendous asset to the organization 

Misconception 2:

If they are not responding, this means they are not understanding what you are saying.

If you ever learned a second language, you would immediately know this is not true.

In second-language acquisition, there are passive skills and active skills.

Passive skills such as listening and reading tend to develop before the more active skills of speaking and writing.

So, keep in mind that just because individuals are not responding (an active skill) it does not mean they are not understanding you.

This, in fact, is a dangerous assumption to make. 

Misconception 3:

Once they learn vocabulary and grammar, it’s smooth sailing from there.

Hardly! That is because there is far more to language proficiency than recognizing words.

If you want to see how badly this can go, listen to my interview with Dr. Theresa Ashby for the podcast, Heart, Hustle, and Humor. It involves my total misunderstanding of the phrase “dressing chickens” and I will leave it at that.

Think of the sentence: I have a lot of running around to do this morning. A non-native speaker could easily interpret that as my being a dedicated athlete.

It takes a much deeper level of proficiency to understand the real meaning of certain phrases or jargons like ballpark figure, shoot from the hip, elbow grease, break a leg, and many others.

Using them in a conversation could pose serious barriers to effective communication. And, invariably, internationals are too embarrassed to ask, so they will go along as it they are understanding what you are saying.

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