Intercultural Communication

Last week I posted some thoughts on how an understanding of the target culture's humor can be one way of developing intercultural understanding and showed how you can implement youtube videos as a source for a discussion. Thinking a little more about the topic of humor I imagined problematic situations that my students might encounter when they visit Germany: when intercultural communication goes wrong and a joke might be interpreted as offensive although it was not intended to be. Different cultures may have different standards of what is offensive and what not. This is, I think, mainly a matter of pragmatics. There is a close link betwwen cultural awareness and pragmatic competence, a key to mastering a foreign language. Pragmatic competence means e.g. that you are able to decode "power relations" in a communicative situation. If you feel offended by a joke that was not intended to be offensive, you might have misinterpreted the speaker's standpoint as being more powerful or "elevated" compared to you, than it really was. Intercultural communicative competence, then, means to have a basic understanding of how native speakers say something in specific situations and being able to decode the original intention correctly. Such competence can only be trained by communication with native speakers, although, as is the case with Germany and America, the pragmatics of humor need not be that far apart in some cases. (The international success of The Simpsons might be a proof for that.)