Bieller 1
Richell Bieller
Instructor: D. Elaine Eaton
COMM.2500.01I
May 01, 2019
Culture and Its Influence on Communication
Culture is a term used to describe accepted norms, common values, and beliefs of a group
or a society. At its core, that is the definition of culture. It is not limited to ethnicity and race, but
rather it is the sum of the multifaceted learned arrangement of beliefs, communications, and
traditions of a group. This paper will highlight how cultural differences affect the way people
communicate. This research will also focus on the Filipino culture and show how its
collectivistic, high-power-distance, and polychronic culture affect day-to-day life.
Culture and communication have an equal influence on one another. To know how
culture influence communication and vice versa, first we must learn what culture and
communication mean. Communication is the method of sending and accepting information. It is
the act of relaying opinions, impressions, and messages through diverse verbal and non-verbal
channels. Culture on the that hand is the learned and acquired knowledge, behavior, and
standards that represent an organization or civilization. Culture plays a fundamental role in
defining the style of communication. A person’s cultural upbringing has an enormous influence
on the way the person speaks and behaves. It also has a significant influence on how a person
interprets other cultures. “Our cultural traditions and belief can influence how we make sense of
communication behavior even without our realizing it. Each of us is affected by the culture in
which we were raised, and we tend to notice other cultures only when they differ from ours”
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(Floyd 35). In other word, culture and communication are codependent, and as culture
progresses, the communication pattern follows and changes as well.
In order to comprehend how culture functions, we have to consider its four main
components, symbol, language, values, and norms. First is a symbol, which is the physical
expression and can be several things, from a flag to the culture’s famous dish. Next is language,
which is considered to be the most significant component of a culture because it is through
language, that people within the culture can communicate, in writing or verbally efficiently. As
Christiansen and Richerson, authors of the book “Cultural Evolution: Society, Technology,
Language, and Religion” claim, “Societal norms about language, to a large extent, are ‘out there’
in some generalized sense, but there are essential subsets of society (e.g., parents, other kindred,
neighborhood, clan, professional networks) which may be disproportionately important” (236).
