SOCIOCULTURAL KNOWLEDGE
In X country long silences are tolerated in conversations.
In Y country you do not normally ask people why they are not married.
In Z country you always refuse an offer at least three times before accepting💡.
Statements like these belong to the area of sociocultural knowledge. This is knowledge about social values and the norms of behaviour in a given society including the way these values and norms are realized thorough language.Sociocultural knowledge can be both extralinguistic and linguistic. Knowing whether people in a given culture shake hands on meeting, or embrace or bow, is extralinguistic; knowing what they say, when they greet each other is clearly linguistic. There has been a lot of debate as to extent to which cultural differences cause misunderstandings or even breakdowns in communications. Unfortunately , the topic gives rise to a great deal of folk theorizing and cultural stereotyping of the type all Japanese do such-and-such and all Arabs say so and so.. In fact, studies of conversational style suggest that there may be as many differences within a particular culture as there are between cultures. In any groups of talkers anywhere, there is always someone who will dominate the conversation and someone else who will not say very much at all.
Nevertheless there are certain speech events, such as greetings, requests, or apologies, where the risk of causing offence has meant that these events have become ritualized in different ways across social groups. Part of a speaker´s knowledge , then, is knowing what these sociocultural rules are and how they are codified.
October 4, 2018
