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6 - Intercultural Communication in a Transnational World

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 December 2017

Ingrid Piller
Affiliation:
Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia
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Summary

CHAPTER OBJECTIVES

This chapter will enable you to:

  • • Learn about mobility as a central aspect of the human experience and critically examine linguistic and cultural aspects of group belonging.

  • • Explore linguistic and cultural aspects of inclusion and exclusion in migrant-receiving societies.

  • • Gain an understanding of the linguistic and cultural barriers to the full and equitable labour-market integration of transnational migrants and their descendants.

  • • Learn about inclusive language and industrial policies in highly diverse societies.

  • PEOPLE ON THE MOVE

    The previous chapter complicated the ‘nation equals culture equals language’ formula by focusing on the fact of multilingualism as the normal human experience. This chapter will continue problematising this simplistic formula from yet another angle, namely that of transnational migration: nations are not – and never have been – homogeneous units descending from some primordial national ancestors who lived in strict isolation from other such primordial national, ethnic or cultural groups. Multiculturalism and cultural diversity have always been the normal human experience, even in small-scale pre-industrial societies, as anthropologist Ward Goodenough (1976) has shown. However, despite the ubiquity of migration, some groups are in a privileged relationship to the nation and one way to maintain their privilege while excluding others is through discourses of culture. This chapter therefore approaches the key question of this book of how culture is made relevant by whom in which context for which purposes from yet another perspective: how do cultural discourses serve as tools of inclusion or exclusion from the nation and its resources?

    We will begin our enquiry with an overview of how the belonging of people on the move has been constructed through the ages. To begin with, mobility constitutes a characteristic of Homo sapiens. In the same way that our ability to communicate through a complex symbolic system – language – distinguishes us from other animals, our propensity to migrate, most notably exemplified by the great human migration out of Africa about 80,000 years ago, distinguishes us from other hominid species. In fact, it has been argued that it is precisely the combination of language and migration that has resulted in the globally dominant position of our species (Gugliotta 2008). However, human language is characteristically diverse: no two human beings speak in exactly the same way but similar ways of using language – in the form of a common language – constitute a group characteristic.

    Type
    Chapter
    Information
    Intercultural Communication
    A Critical Introduction
    , pp. 100 - 119
    Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
    Print publication year: 2017

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