Page 291 - Between One and Many The Art and Science of Public Speaking

258 Part 3 Putting Theory Into Practice

Language and Cultural Diversity

The United States is a multiracial, multiethnic, multicultural nation. With the
exception of Native Americans, 98 percent of the population can trace its ances-
try to another country.
Recall from Chapter 6 that cultural diversity is multidimensional, including
audience characteristics such as individualism/collectivism and masculinity/
femininity. Knowing something about the dimensions of culture refl ected in the
audience is essential to choosing appropriate language for a speech.
One of the authors, for example, had the opportunity to attend an IBM rec-
ognition event where former NFL quarterback and Monday Night football an-
nouncer Joe Theismann was one of the keynote speakers. Theismann’s audience
included many people from IBM operations in the Far East and Latin America,
both of which are largely collectivistic in outlook. Although most North Ameri-
cans in the audience responded positively to Theismann’s speech, not everyone
did. His remarks were perceived as egotistical and self-aggrandizing by people
from such places as Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, Argentina, and Venezuela. As
one person from Buenos Aires remarked, “You would have thought American
football was an individual sport listening to him [Theismann]—that he won the
Super Bowl single-handedly. Does he know a word other than I?”
All too often speakers choose language appropriate to their culture, but not
necessarily to the cultures of their audience members. Like Theismann, they
naively assume that what is good enough for their culture is good enough for
everyone’s. Of course, this kind of thinking is not only inaccurate, it is arrogant.
Even commonplace language choices, such as what name to call a person,
can be infl uenced by culture. In many, such as those that use the Spanish lan-
guage, strangers are not addressed informally, and certainly not by their fi rst
names. A salesperson, for example, who addresses a potential client by his or
her fi rst name may, unintentionally, offend that person. Yet this is commonplace
in the U.S. The best advice is to ask people how they prefer to be addressed
rather than automatically assuming that they want to be on a fi rst-name basis.

Language and Demographic Diversity

Recall from Chapter 6 that demographic diversity is refl ected in the groups to
which people belong and with which they identify. This includes such charac-
teristics as nationality, race and ethnicity, gender, and religion. Demographic
diversity also includes social and economic class, the region of the country that
people call home, and the generation to which people belong.
Demographic diversity, although always an important consideration of a
speaker’s audience analysis, has become even more so. Today’s college class-
room is likely to be populated by people with a variety of different demographic
backgrounds. Race and ethnicity, as cases in point, are often an important part
of today’s audience diversity.
How we refer to a specifi c racial or ethnic group can have a strong impact on
the individual members of that group in our audience. For example, when An-
glos speak to a gathering of English-speaking people of Mexican descent, they
need to choose the appropriate language in referring to the audience. Scholars
Mario Garcia and Rodolfo Alvarez suggest that people of Mexican descent in