Intercultural Communication: The Interaction Between People Around The World

Modern communications have become the cynosure of research for the simple reason that they are fundamental to organizing every aspect of contemporary life - from the broad aspect of social institutions and cultural systems to the intimate daily encounters along with people’s personal understandings of the world and their sense of themselves. Media, internet, traveling and interaction have intensified the human bond from every nook and corner of the globe, eventually transforming it now into the so-called ‘global village’.

As stated by Dwight Chestnut, “Globalization is the process of integrating people from various countries, nations, cultures and governments into one global melting pot”. The process is driven by the economics of free market

More specifically, it is affected by how people from different countries and cultures behave, communicate, and perceive the world around them. Most people have a variety of intercultural relationships that may feature differences in age, physical ability, gender, ethnicity, class, religion, race, or nationality. In the context of globalization, intercultural communication has become ubiquitous in contemporary business communication. People keep moving around the world and have always traveled from their homelands, but with the increasing technological ease of travel, people are moving much more than ever before. Sojourners, business travelers, tourists, immigrants, and refugees have very different reasons for

A modern culture is one whereby people tend to create uniformity in their behavior so as to avoid intercultural clashes and barriers. The nonverbal aspect of communication is an important part of intercultural communication. Non-verbal communication can be narrowly used to refer to intentional use, as in using a non-spoken symbol to communicate a specific message. In its accurate sense “non-verbal behaviour’ refers to actions as distinct from speech. It thus includes facial expressions, hand and arms gestures, postures, positions and various movements of the body or the legs and feet. Nonverbal behavior includes also paralinguistic or vocal phenomena, such as fundamental frequency range and intensity range, speech errors or pauses, speech rate and speech duration (Mehrabian, 1972: 1). Through traveling, interaction and media, the urge of understanding, learning and inculcating the different nonverbal languages of other cultures has become stronger which is eventually molding a new modern