“To establish a more fundamental intercultural understanding, the foreign partner must acquire the host culture language. Having to express oneself in another language means learning to adopt someone else’s reference frame. It is doubtful whether one can be bicultural without also being bilingual... Without knowing the language one will miss a lot of the subtleties of a culture and be forced to remain a relative outsider.” (Hofstede)
I posted this on my "faith and culture" blog site. I'm posting it here in response to a comment by AmelMag, "I think this is also a peace quote, in its way. Because, without learning to adopt each other's frames of reference (and languages) how can there be peace?"
I posted this on my "faith and culture" blog site. I'm posting it here in response to a comment by AmelMag, "I think this is also a peace quote, in its way. Because, without learning to adopt each other's frames of reference (and languages) how can there be peace?"
No comments:
Post a Comment