influence of culture on communication

Assignment one
Part I
Discuss the influence culture has on communication and how this affects communication between different cultures, sometimes creating difficulties in the communication process. Give examples.

Culture is a way of life. It is also defined as a deposit of knowledge, experiences, beliefs, values, attitudes, material objects and possession acquired over a period of time by large group of people in the course of generations.
Culture is a form or pattern of living which defines how people learn to think, feel, believe and strive for what they consider proper such as language habits, communication pattern, social acts, economic and social activities.
The link between culture and communication is important to understand because it is through the influence of culture that people learn to communicate.
The behaviour of people sharing a common culture can convey meaning because of differences in cultures, communication practises and behaviour differs. Aspects that influence communicative behaviour are social cultural elements. Some aspects related to perception of verbal and non-verbal process.
Perception is the way by which an individual selects, evaluates and organises stimuli from the external world. Communication maintains that people behave as they do due to the ways in which they perceive the world that these behaviours are learned.
When communication is between two different cultures, the massage form the sender to the receiver will undergo a process of encoding and decoding. When a massage is transmitted by sender from one culture to a receiver in another culture, , the process of encoding influenced by the culture from which these two people come from. When the massage leaves one culture, it contains the meaning intended by the encoder. The meaning is influenced by the culture in which it is sent and not influenced by the decoder’s culture. The influence communication has on inter cultural communication is a function of the dissimilarity between cultures. For examples, there are lots of similarities in the culture of the Bantu people in the way they marry, bury their dead and the way they accord respect to the elders. These cultural attributes may be quite different from people in the western world whose cultural pattern has developed along different path ways. People also differ in lifestyle according to the social economic classes to which they belong to e.g. the rich people and the poor people.
Culture affects communication if different ways. Information influences our beliefs and there by influencing our culture. The sources of information have an impact on what people believe, such as the experiences of other people, magazines, news media and text books. These sources of information may be considered authoritative enough to affect people’s culture and how they communicate. An authority in terms of information may be a person or an institute which is believed to provide true and correct information that can be relied upon.
Inferential beliefs formed by going beyond direct observation and information. They are formed by using internal logic system in their information. E.g. when they observe a particular behaviour and ascribe it to particular emotions such as when people start issuing obscenities, we infer that they are angry.
Culture can also create difficulties in communication. The major problem connected with inter cultural communication is that of stereotypes. These are biased behaviours expected in a person of another culture. Dominant cultures also tent to have control over the way other cultures intrude upon mainstream society. In inter-ethnic communication this refers to communication where sender and receiver are of different ethnic groups but of the same race, e.g. Hutus and Tutsis of Rwanda. Cultural variances also poses a challenge in inter cultural communication.
Cultural values can be identified as primary, secondary or tertiary depending on the location of particular values in the culture’s hierarchy of values. Individualism may not be considered primary in African culture but communism and the sense of collective belonging and responsibility are important.