Language, culture, and intercultural communication

Intercultural communication is a highly diverse field; it is being studied within numerous academic and para-academic disciplines and from a range of more or less interdisciplinary perspectives. Intercultural communication is of concern to researchers and practitioners in various strands of linguistics, translation studies, media and communication research, business and management, ethnography, psychology, pedagogy, sociology, philosophy, and international relations – and this list may not be exhaustive. Moreover, a conglomerate of synonymous or related terms exists, such as ‘cross-cultural communication,’ ‘intercultural training,’ ‘intercultural competence,’ and ‘intercultural integration.’ A search on https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xlink:href=" https://amazon.com "> https://amazon.com (conducted on September 9, 2024) for ‘intercultural communication’ (all searches with quotation marks) yielded more than 4,000 results and for ‘cross-cultural communication’ another 924 hits for books alone. A search conducted on the same day in ProQuest (all data bases) turned out 8,902 hits for ‘intercultural communication’ and 2,951 for ‘cross-cultural communication’ published in the last ten years – and these hits only include the relevant works published in English. Within the framework of this chapter, it is impossible to survey the myriad of books and articles individually. Instead, the attempt is made here to trace basic orientations, theoretical positions and philosophical models toward the triangular constellation of language, culture, and (intercultural) communication that, implicitly or explicitly, underlie most works and approaches, and to highlight the particular contribution cultural linguistics can make and has already made to the field.