Cultural Diversity in Communciation

            I have become somewhat of an expert in cultural diversity communications over the last 18 years of my life because my husband and his family are from Bangladesh.  I am a seventh generation Californian with a liberal feminist position.  I started taking classes on cultural diversity in psychology when I was still in community college, just because I wanted to learn better ways to communicate and deal with my extended family.  Learning to communicate and develop a relationship with my mother in law gave me an edge in my education and career and that was never even my intent. 

            Learning to develop intercultural relationships changes from culture to culture because each culture has different norms and values for behavior and interaction (Hahn, 2005).  But general guidelines for intercultural communication are viable in any intercultural exchange.  According to Hahn, awareness of differing social values is the first commandment of intercultural communication (Hahn, 2005).  I would like to point out that intercultural differences are not limited to international communication and people from cultures outside the United States, or any country of origin.  Intercultural communication is also important to understand between genres of people within the same environment.  An example would be the interaction between a 17 year old and a 70 year old.  Yes, the two individuals may have grown up on the same block and lived in the same neighborhood their whole lives, but the 70 year old grew up in an entirely different culture than the 17 year old.  A person from Alabama is from the same country as someone from California, but they are from entirely different cultures.  Martin Hahn, Ph.D. developed a brilliant strategy for intercultural communication in his Ten Commandments of Intercultural Communication (Hahn, 2005), but I will use these same guidelines for interactions with everyone I come into contact with.  We are one world, one people, and billions of personality quirks and differences to navigate. 

Hahn, M. (2005).  Ten commandments of intercultural communication. Ezine@articles. Retrieved March 29, 2012 from http://ezinearticles.com/?Ten-Commandments-of-Intercultural-Communication&id=120247