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Sociolinguistic aspects of culture shock In the century of Internet and omnipresent mass media it would hardly be expected to find someone, who comes to a new country being totally ignorant of a new culture. But no matter how much information that person has been exposed to, it only to a certain extent reduces the phenomenon known as culture shock. The term culture shock has recently entered the vocabulary of the English language. Harper Dictionary of Contemporary Usage 1985 defines culture shock as follows: "Culture shock is the extreme discomfiture which a person may experience when plunged into a culture or a way of life new and foreign to him." Usually the state of "culture shock" is applicable to people who come to a new country either forever or for a long period of time and shouldn’t be mixed up with the so-called "tourist excitement." The anthropologist Kalfery Oberg was the first to introduce this term in 1960. In his work "Cultural Shock: Adjustment to New Cultural Environment" in a very precise way Oberg listed four stages of culture shock: 1. Honeymoon stage. An initial reaction of enchantment, fascination, enthusiasm, admiration and cordial, friendly, superficial relationships with hosts. 2. Crisis. Initial differences in language, concepts, values, familiar signs and symbols lead to feelings of inadequacy, frustration, anxiety and anger. 3. Recovery. The crisis is resolved by number of methods such that the person ends up learning the language and culture of the host country. 4. Adjustment. The sojourner begins to work in and enjoy the new culture, though there may be occasional instances of anxiety and strain.
The degree and manifestations of culture shock may vary depending on the personalities of the people who experience it, but it is almost inevitable, as people coming to a new culture face a lot of problems and questions simultaneously. In the present article the author will focus on sociolinguistic aspects of culture shock, namely what role the language plays in the process of adjustment to a new culture. The two principal questions that the author will make an attempt to answer are: why culture shock is almost inevitable and what role the language and language training plays in cultural adaptation. This piece of qualitative research is based on the personal experience of living in a foreign country for more than six months, observations and in-depth interviews of the people who have lived in foreign countries for an extensive period of time and personal work experience as a language and cross-culture coordinator in US Peace Corps, Ukraine. Usually a person coming to a new culture brings the knowledge about this culture based on the information received in home country. But very few people realize that they bring their own understanding and interpretation of a new culture which, unfortunately, in many cases is full of stereotypes and false judgments. This is so-called knowledge about the culture, not of the culture. What is more, they try to apply the knowledge of their culture to a new one, and this very rarely works as there are very few culturally homogeneous societies in the world. Craig Storti in his book ‘The Art of Crossing Cultures’ writes the following: "In the same regard, we should remind ourselves that to be ignorant (of another culture) doesn't mean we wont still feel threatened by it. The unknown is inherently unsettling; we can never be sure but that one day what we don't know will indeed hurt us. To be ignorant of a foreign culture is, in the end, to fear - and therefore dislike - it"( p. 43). So, ignorance of the culture, as well as knowledge about the culture, are those extra linguistics factors that prevent the newcomers from smooth and easy adaptation to a new culture. Culture consists of the "totally of nonhereditary information acquired, preserved, and transmitted by the various groups of human society. Culture is built on natural language, and its relation to this natural language is one of its most essential parameters. " (Ju.Lotman,1977) So, different cultural communities tend to develop culturally distinct interactional styles. Psychologists say that people enjoy the comfort of the familiar. Pr. Kasper, University of Hawaii at Manoa, in her speech at TESOL'97 indicated that people, evaluating a new culture, usually divide all the cultural phenomena into two groups: strange and familiar. A new culture brings the discomfort of the unknown. Culture shock is precipitated by the anxiety that results from losing all our familiar signs and symbols of social intercourse (Oberg,1960). A lot of people are aware of the probable difficulties in the process of adjusting to a new culture and they try to eliminate them still being in home country. The first step that they usually take - they start to study the language of a new culture. To know the language is very important as a human language is the unique system of communication. However, what often happens to a person with a rather good command of the foreign language in a new culture is that she or he can easily talk about, for example, global problems or French Impressionism but is absolutely unable to express the basic needs in the grocery store. What happens is that the vocabulary of all the cultures is elaborated in the direction of what is most important and relevant to that culture. Learning a foreign language in home country, in isolation from the culture it is spoken, a person uses it to describe not the foreign but native environment and everyday life, which in many ways are very different in different countries. Anthropologist Edward Sapir wrote: "Human beings do not live in the objective world alone... But are very much at mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society. The fact is that the "real world" is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group. No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality. The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached"(p.162).
Human communication is a two -way process. So, it is not only important for the addresser to present the information but what is even more important is for the addressee to understand it adequately. Natural language discourse is not always explicit. That is, there are propositions which may be inferred from other propositions which have been expressed. Such propositions can be called missing links. Using the elements of images, contrasts, analogies - expressed verbally - a listener restores what was implied. But for a person from a different culture very often these ‘missing links’ remain missing as she or he cannot rely on the images, contrasts, etc. as they are often different in different cultures. G. Potcheptsov, a highly esteemed scholar of linguistics in Ukraine, referring to the results of series of psychological studies, states that our memory keeps not only information given directly, but information given implicitly. A person who remembers and uses the information does not differentiate between these two types of information. Information that contains a lot of cultural implications and references is natural for the native speakers of the language but is too much to be understood by a person new to that culture. It takes time and complete immersion into a new culture to be able to understand and compose messages containing conversational implicature. People who come to a new culture are not only the addressees but also the addressers of the information. The information about a person can be received verbally as well as non-verbally. Edward Hall wrote that "time talks and space speaks." We can get the information about the person from body language, tone of voice and other code systems. But mostly people are judged by what they say. In 1974 Robin Lakoff wrote "You are what you say", referring to women's language, but this conclusion can be applied to any communicant. Nonverbal signs and symbols can only to a certain extent provide the information about the person, while verbally a person can express his or her most complicated thoughts and ideas. Human language is a creative and flexible system that makes communication, even on very abstract topics, possible. But for the communication to be not only possible but successful, it should possess certain qualities. H.P. Grice pointed out that the most important principle of successful conversation is the cooperative principle. The cooperative principle is realized by the conversational maxims, worked out by Grice: 1. The maxim of relevance (the information should be relevant to the subject-matter); 2. The maxim of quantity (the information should be precise and brief); 3. The maxim of quality (the information should be true); 4. The maxim of manner (the information should be understandable and clear). When any of these maxims is deliberately violated by one of the interlocutors, this leads to conversational implication, but if the information is adequately understood and interpreted by the other, the conversation is successful. At the same time, when maxims are violated by the speaker without intention or when the listener does not understand what is implied, it leads to communication gap or complete misunderstanding. There is one more maxim, introduced by Geoffrey Leech - the maxim of politeness ( the information should be presented according to the norms of behavior). Norms of behavior are usually reflected in the rules of etiquette, the members of a certain speech community follow. Alongside with the universal principles of etiquette, there are a lot of differences, even in very close cultures. "Culturally colored interactional styles create culturally determined expectations and interpretive strategies, and can lead to breakdowns in intercultural and interethnic communication" (Gumperz, 1978). It was very interesting to observe the situation in one of the US hospitals where a very kind, intelligent and with a good sense of humor Russian woman had undergone surgery and was in Rehab. Department. I was surprised and almost taken aback that people in the hospital found her rather demanding and willful. My surprise vanished when I heard her speaking English to the nurses and doctors. She operated with very short sentences which consisted of infinitives and that made her sentences sound imperative. She spoke louder than in Russian, as the natural and unconscious reaction of people when they are not understood is to speak louder. So, without intention she violated almost all the maxims introduced by Grice and Leech. As the result the cooperative principle was broken and conversation was not successful. In Peace Corps Ukraine, where I worked as language and cross-culture coordinator, one of the major tacks for the volunteers-to-be during their Pre-Service Training was to learn the culture and language of the host country. Language instructors were often invited and encouraged to come to the English language presentations of their trainees. And that proved mutually beneficial for the both parts. Trainees were able to reestablish their status as professionals, which was very difficult to show at language sessions, as in the very beginning they were struggling with Slavic sounds and took pains to compose simple sentences. Language instructors admitted that during those presentations their students looked confident and professional in contrast to those sometimes helpless communicants in class and focused their instruction on the principles of adult learning. Summing up the observations of American Peace Corps volunteers in Ukraine and foreign exchange scholars and students in the United States, I have come to the conclusion that the most difficult part of cultural adaptation in a new country is reestablishing the social status by the adult professionals. Differences in research paper styles, academia and business structures and regulations, initial linguistic and cross-cultural barrier in communication are the most painful and difficult problems that a professional person faces in a totally new cultural environment. Successful preparation of the people who will live and work in a foreign country for an extensive period of time depends on the design of the intensive language and cross-cultural program. To be relevant to the needs of the trainees, this program should make a clear-cut distinction between culture and cross-culture. That is, to teach the culture of the new country and at the same time put the emphasis on the similarities and differences of the host and home cultures. For adult learners it is extremely useful to provide historical and cultural backgrounds to explain the differences in two cultures, it ensures better understanding, that is a conscious approach to adaptation in a new culture. In other words, a person cannot and should not come to a foreign country with the aim to change its culture, but to understand and appreciate it and this ensures the successful application of his or her knowledge under new conditions. In its turn, language training should incorporate the results of the research in the fields of sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics and other branches of linguistics into the curriculum, with the focus on the distinction between language and speech, an idea long ago suggested by Ferdinand de Saussure. In many cases intensive linguistic preparation is viewed only as giving as much language information (extensive vocabulary, phonetic and grammar rules) as possible in the shortest amount of time. Language trainer should keep in mind that speech is a creation of the moment, though in accordance with the rules of a certain language. So, to prepare a successful communicant in a foreign language, language training should include extra linguistic elements, such as: cultural settings proxemics, kinesics, etc. Besides, it would be extremely useful to incorporate in the secondary and higher school foreign languages programs culture and cross-culture texts and dialogues that reflect linguistic daily rituals of the country under study. There is a limited literature on linguistic aspects of culture shock and even almost absent the literature which describes the sociolinguistic influence of the newcomers on the language and the culture of the community they live in, as any process that involves human communication, even passive, is a two-way one. So, if people who come to a new culture experience different aspects of culture shock, there is no guaranty that people of the local community do not experience the ‘reverse’ or ‘domestic’ culture shock caused by the culture of the people who are new to their community. This field of linguistic and social interaction is open for research.
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