Page 424 - Cultures and Organizations

Intercultural Encounters 389

languages were French or Italian, with native German speakers taking a
middle position. 7
Communication in trade languages or pidgin limits exchanges to the

issues for which these simplified languages have words. To establish a more
fundamental intercultural understanding, the foreign partner must acquire
the host culture language. Having to express oneself in another language
means learning to adopt someone else’s frame of reference. It is doubtful
8
whether one can be bicultural without also being bilingual. Although the
words of which a language consists are symbols in terms of the onion
diagram (Figure 1.2), which means that they belong to the surface level of
a culture, they are also the vehicles of culture transfer. Moreover, words
are obstinate vehicles: our thinking is affected by the categories for which
9
words are available in our language. Many words have migrated from
their language of origin into others because they express something
unique: algebra, management, computer, apartheid, machismo, perestroika,
geisha, sauna, weltanschauung, weltschmerz, karaoke, mafi a, savoir vivre.
The skill of expressing oneself in more than one language is unevenly
distributed across countries. People from smaller, affl uent countries, such
as the Swiss, Belgians, Scandinavians, Singaporeans, and Dutch, benefi t
from both frequent contact with foreigners and good educational systems,
and therefore they tend to be polyglot. Their organizations possess a stra-
tegic advantage in intercultural contacts in that they nearly always have
people available who speak several foreign languages, and whoever speaks
more than one language will more easily pick up additional ones.
Paradoxically, having English, the world trade language, as one’s
native tongue is a liability, not an asset, for truly communicating with
other cultures. Native English speakers do not always realize this. They
are like the proverbial American farmer from Kansas who is alleged to

have said, “If English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it is good enough
for me.” Geert once met an Englishman working near the Welsh border
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who said he turned down an offer of a beautiful home across the border,
in Wales, because there his young son would have had to learn Welsh as a
second language at school. In our view, he missed a unique contribution to
his son’s education as a world citizen.
Language and culture are not so closely linked that sharing a language
implies sharing a culture, nor should a difference in language always impose
a difference in cultural values. In Belgium, where Dutch and French are the
two dominant national languages (there is a small German-speaking area