The incident occurred mid-morning in early summer, when I had a chance to visit my aunt in the State, in a large market at the checkout counter. The intercultural miscommunication involved an Asian supermarket checker named Linda, and a lady from my aunt’s neighborhood called Dionne Carter. Linda was a middle-aged woman with a heavy accent and Mrs. Carter, an American school teacher. Linda's accent was very strong and she tended to run her words together in one quick stream, while speaking very loud.
Dionne had a dozen items or so in her cart and as she moved up in line and started placing them on the counter Linda greeted her--without smiling--in a flat, harsh-sounding voice, saying "How are you today?" Mrs. Carter smiled at her and softly said "Just fine." Half of the way through scanning the items Linda came to a carton of Diet Coke. She slapped her hand down on it and said "You need two of these." Clearly Dionne did not hear her well enough. She looked up as though she was startled and confused. Linda repeated, a bit louder, "You need two of these" and Dionne replied "No, one's fine for now."
Linda persisted and said, "Two, much better. I put two for you," while gesturing toward the cash register. This left Mrs. Carter with nothing to say except to repeat herself. But Linda said again, which made Mrs. Carter so annoyed that she snatched the other carton of Diet Coke away in Linda’s awe.
As a result, this incident carved in Linda’s mind an impression of an arrogant ‘native’ American while Mrs. Carter held a contempt everytime she encountered immigrants.
The problem of intercultural communication that arose in the situation was, however, only partly due to Linda's abilities with word selection and accent in English. Linda was an immigrant speaking primarily her mother tongue. She uses the linguistic isolates of his [or her] mother tongue--which gives him [or her] an accent. So while her message to Mrs. Carton was “You may want to get two cartons today”, “two-for-one”; she did not use the words “may”, “two-for-one”
On the other hand, Mrs. Carton who was born and grew up in America was too used to her native language (English) and did not understand Linda’s expression. All in all, lack of understanding of each other culture could lead to miscommunication, and possibly conflict.
