Understanding Intercultural Dialogue

• Intercultural dialogue promotes a more peaceful, just, and sustainable world.
• Effective communication across cultures is crucial in a world where people from diverse backgrounds interact daily.
• Technology has made cultural exchanges easier and more significant.
• Efficient cross-cultural dialogue is important for addressing global issues like global warming through collaborative efforts.

Culture Defined

• Culture involves unconscious behaviors and modes.
• Culture is a collection of ideas and feelings accepted by the majority in a society.
• Culture includes beliefs, arts, skills, moralities, laws, traditions, and behaviors acquired from society
• Culture consists of symbols, norms, and values within a social organization.
• Culture is a psychological influence that affects individual decisions and behaviors.
• Practices are standard behaviors that are a visible aspect of cultural influence, including language, eating habits, greetings, walking speed, and clothing.
• Values are core abstract drives, such as honesty, creativity, cleanliness, and efficiency.
• Cultures are internally consistent, matching values with practices.
• Respecting social order as a cultural value aligns with practices showing respect to higher-status people.

Cultural Communication

• Contact and exchanges are inevitable within and outside a culture.
• Intracultural Communication occurs between members of the same language community.
• Intercultural Communication occurs between individuals from different cultures in a common language.
• Cultural beliefs, values, and practices are shared through intracultural and intercultural communication.
• Differences in language, words, gestures, and phrases can impact communication.
• Culture shapes how people communicate and what language is appropriate in different contexts.
• Cultural values and norms influence decision-making and interpretation of messages, especially in business.
• Cultural knowledge aids communication and respect.
• Directness is standard in some Western cultures but may be avoided in Eastern cultures.
• Edward Hall's Context Theory explains that cultures communicate explicitly (Low-Context) or implicitly (High-Context).
• Cultural background affects comprehension.
• Cultural understanding can bridge people together.

Multiculturalism

• Multiculturalism is a pluralistic approach to cultural diversity, where different groups coexist while maintaining their differences.
• Individuals have legitimate interests in their culture, language, and identity.
• Multiculturalism is inclusive, ensuring no one is excluded.
• Diversity is a safeguard against making one group the norm.
• Governments and institutions should foster equality for people from various cultural backgrounds.
• Multiculturalism promotes open-mindedness and understanding of different perspectives.
• Multiculturalism helps dispel negative stereotypes and personal biases.
• People recognize and respect diverse ways of being through multiculturalism.
• Interactions enable building trust, respect, and understanding across cultures.
• Recognizing and accepting cultural diversity contributes to language skills, new ways of thinking, knowledge, and experiences.

Effective Cross-Cultural Communication

• Communication challenges can be complex in diverse environments.
• Each culture has its own norms and behaviors, which can make expressing your point difficult.
• Cross-cultural communication is demanding even without a language barrier.
• To communicate effectively across cultures, adopt these attitudes:
• Learn about the culture beforehand.
• Expect differences in communication styles.
• Understand social hierarchies.
• Be upfront about communication difficulties.
• Be respectful and tolerant.
• Be patient.
• Misunderstanding is common, but cultural awareness is essential in today's globalized world.

World Englishes

• English transitioned from being a colonizer's language to a global lingua franca.
• "World Englishes (WE)" considers English from a pluralistic perspective with distinct varieties in countries where it is not the first language.
• Kachru's Three Circle Model explains WE:
• The Inner Circle: traditional bases of English (UK, USA, Canada) setting norms.
• The Outer Circle: countries with official non-native English or English as a second language (India, Singapore, Philippines) that develop the norms.
• The Expanding Circle: countries where English is a foreign language (China, Russia, Brazil) that follow the rules established by the Inner and Outer circles.
• The Philippines falls within the Outer Circle due to its colonial history with America, which established the country's first centralized public school system in 1901.
• The usage of English in the Philippines has changed, influenced by Filipino languages and cultures.

Philippine English

• Philippine English (PhE) is nativized and follows American English’s spelling, grammar, punctuation, and date notations.
• Linguists have identified the phonological properties, semantic and syntactic behaviors, and pragmatic and discourse qualities of PhE.
• There is an explicit localisation of English by Filipinos.
• Teaching PhE alongside standard American English (AmE) is a move being made.
• The words with the soft "th" sound or // would be replaced by the "t" sound or /t/, changing the phonemic classification of the sound.
• The same goes with the complex "th" sound or /o/, which would often be replaced with the "d" sound or /d/.
• There are lexical differences, such as the use of "based from," "fill up," and "cope up with" intranationally, but "based on," "fill out," and "cope with" internationally.
• The ability to switch between PhE and AmE is a competitive advantage.
• Being able to adjust speech makes one intelligible to a wide range of first language speakers, most of whom are not inner-circle native speakers.