Page 364 - Handbooks of Applied Linguistics Communication Competence Language and Communication Problems Practical Solutions

342 Ingrid Piller

once a cross-cultural relationship has been established elsewhere (Piller 2001a,
2001b, 2002, in press), particularly language choice, the assumption that com-
munication in cross-cultural intimate relationships is a “problem” per se, argu-
ments, and the bilingual education of children in such relationships. Second,
and more importantly, it would be wrong to assume that an intimate relation-
ship is characterized by cross-cultural communication for an extended period
just because the partners come from different national and/or linguistic back-
grounds. As elsewhere, cross-cultural communication cannot be defined on the
basis of the identities of the interactants, but rather on the basis of what it is that
interactants orient to: only if they orient to cultural difference and culture as a
category is actively constructed, can a communicative event be considered
cross-cultural (Piller 2000; Scollon and Scollon 2001, Spreckels and Kotthoff in
this volume). The more established a cross-cultural intimate relationship be-
comes, the rarer cross-cultural communication will be.

2. Endogamy and exogamy

Many societies around the world see endogamous relationships – marriage
within one’s own group – as the norm, and intermarriage as the exception from
the norm that is in need of explanation. By contrast, a relatively small number of
societies routinely practice exogamy, and consider intra-cultural marriage a
deviation from what is typically done. Examples of traditional societies that
consider intermarriage the norm include the Banoni on the Solomon Islands
(Lincoln 1979) and the Tucanoan in the Vaupés region in the North West Ama-
zon Basin of Brazil and Colombia (Jackson 1983). The Tucanoan have a strong
taboo against endogamy, and group membership is defined on the basis of one’s
“native” language. Residence is patri-local and language usage is dual-lingual,
i.e. each partner speaks their “native” language and receives the partner’s
“native” language back. A child grows up hearing the father’s language spoken
widely, but also the language of the mother, and those of other female relatives,
all of whom would be in-married. Thus, children grow up multilingual but con-
sider their father’s language their “native” language. Intermarriage is also fast
becoming the predominant practice in some non-traditional societies such as
Australia, where a 2004 newspaper article reported that “love is changing the
face of Australia” (Gibbs and Delaney 2004). According to Gibbs and Delaney
(2004), 22% of the Australian population claimed more than one ancestry in the
2001 national census – a figure that reflects the intermarriage rate of previous
generations, and is presumably significantly higher today.
It is against this background of different ideologies about intermarriage that
intimate cross-cultural communication occurs. Ideology may be clearly stated as
societal rules or taboos as in the Tucanoan case, or it may be implicit in practice