Language: an essential component of intercultural communicative competence

No one doubts the importance of language in our lives. In fact, it would be hard to imagine life without the ability to communicate. Yet, because language has always been present-for as long as we can remember-we seldom consider the role and impact of the specific system of symbols that we use on a daily basis. This is true for our native language system, and it is just as true when dealing with people across different language-culture backgrounds. To understand more fully the role and impact of our native language (L1), as well as that of asecond language (L2) during intercultural contact, let us consider how language mediates absolutely everything we do: consider the notion that language makes the anthropoid “human”. And consider language as a sort of “original sin” in the sense that language is not really about what it “is” but rather what it “stands for”. The markings you are “reading” on this page (and the sounds they suggest), for example, represent something other than simply “markings” on the page or “sounds” in the air. They are the formulaic vehicles we use to transmit meaning from one person to another. Language is a convenient and efficient way to do just that. Moreover, in addition to representing something other than itself, the words of a languageactually represent abstractions from experience, formed into thoughts, shaped by our linguistic system, and conveyed through discrete graphic markings or sound bites, conjoined in a stream. Through these representational symbols, we perform an amazing range of functions: we can specify and designate individual units or concepts (e.g., tears, milk, steam, water, Coke, all manifestations of the category “liquids”), or we can generalize phenomena by employing a single word label to group together even dissimilar things (e.g., “animals” to lump together dogs, cats, porcupines, and cows). In other words, we can distinguish things from each other or group them together at will (and as our language permits). We can also label something as a “whole” entity (e.g., tree) or cite its separate “parts” (e.g., leaves, bark, trunk, roots). All these abilities form part of a linguistic system we learned from infancy and on into childhood, a continuing process throughout life, and one that we seldom give any thought to at all.