Conflict Between German And Australian Workplace Telephone...

In an increasingly globalized environment, employers often look for potential workers who are familiar in one or more foreign languages. Unfortunately, perceived linguistic competence is often based on fluency in the vocabulary and grammar of the target language, with less of a focus on sensitivity towards cultural and semantic differences. Left unstudied, these differences can easily lead to, at best, misunderstanding and confusion in the workplace. At worst, an employee not understanding the speech acts of another could find themselves offended by perceived â€Å"rude† behavior and perpetuate cultural stereotypes of the other group. As English is a Germanic language, the linguistic gap from an outsider’s perspective does not seem wide.†¦show more content†¦A speech act is defined by George Yule as â€Å"an action such as ‘promising’ performed by a speaker with an utterance, either as a direct speech act or an indirect speech act† (Yule 298 ). Germans tend to be more direct with speech acts, and more explicit than English speakers when expressing disappointment or blame; they are less likely to imply a request and more likely to outright give a command or complaint (Grieve 193-194). Whereas English speakers are more likely to be indirect and keep opinions and emotions to themselves, focusing on being polite during a complaint rather than being direct, Grieve writes that Germans are more content-, goal-, and truth-oriented than English speakers (Grieve 193). This difference in weight on the importance of politeness over directness is a critical sociolinguistic difference between English speakers and German speakers, and stems from a cultural difference in content of conversation. Whereas German speakers value the information-conveying function in a conversation, English speakers value the social bonding aspect (Evans Davis 218). However, this does not imply that Germans are simply impolite; in instances of broad social distance between Germans, Germans use more advanced politeness elements, similar to English speakers (Stranovskà ¡ et al., 769). Co-workers are considered to have a closer social distance than the distance