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Discourse, cultural diversity and communication 13

2. Discourse, cultural diversity and
communication:
a linguistic anthropological perspective

John J. Gumperz and Jenny Cook-Gumperz

1. Language difference and cultural relativity

Anthropology’s critical contribution to intercultural communication is the in-
sight that language differences affecting interpretation in everyday life are not
just matters of semantics and grammar. Speaking and understanding also de-
pend on the social situations in which verbal exchanges take place. Over the
past four decades the developing field of linguistic anthropology has refined
these initial insights into a theory of communicative practice that accounts for
both universals of contexts and cultural differences in interpretation. The early
post World War Two research on intercultural communication was bedeviled
by the commonsense assumption that since language shapes the way we classi-
fy our experiential worlds and therefore think, communicating across cultural
boundaries becomes inherently problematic. Popular writings on this issue
appear in many forms, from undergraduate term papers to political arguments
for language and immigration policies and reflect a “language myth” of essen-
tialized cultural difference that many scholars have attempted to argue against
e.g. Agar (2002); Bauer and Trudgill (1998).
While ideas akin to what we now call relativity have been debated at various
times throughout history, particularly in the 18th and 19th centuries, it was not
until the early part of the 20th century that the notion was systematized and
integrated into the then prevailing empiricist academic tradition of linguistic
and anthropological analysis of Boas, Sapir, Whorf. In particular, Whorf’s popu-
lar writings (1956) and the striking examples he cited from his own professional
experience as an insurance investigator, illustrated how semantic and grammati-
cal inter-language differences may bring about potentially serious, sometimes
fatal misunderstandings. This work brought linguistic and cultural relativity
to the attention of a wider public. A second generation of scholars set out to test
Whorf’s findings by combining ethnographic fieldwork on culture with system-
atic linguistic research (Carol and Casagrande 1959). But as Lucy (1992) ar-
gues, these early attempts to validate Whorf’s insightful and suggestive argu-
ments through comparative analysis were theoretically and empirically flawed
and unsuccessful. Following these failures, scholarly interest turned away from
relativity to focus on universals of language and thought.