Barriers Of Intercultural Communication

1. Introduction

Humans have a similar way of doing things, they share the same values and operate by the same rules. Thus, every Human being shares a common interest, the desire to be with people who are similar to themselves (Keles, 2013).

In recent years, we are faced with such a vast variety of cultures with whom we communicate with on a daily basis, people with diverse backgrounds leading linguistically and culturally diverse lives or people engaged in linguistically and culturally diverse relationships.

There is often anxiety surrounding unfamiliar cultures. There are many unanswered questions such as: What behavior is acceptable? What will come arcoss as offensive to a person from a different background? It can be limiting to communicate

Intercultural communication can be divided into two parts. Inter- which means between and culture, which is defined as the characteristics and knowledge of a particular group of people (Zimmerman, 2017). Therefore, Intercultural communication is the interaction between people that share different characteristics and knowledge. LaRay M. Barna (1997) has developed an approach to examine barriers to intercultural communication on a general level. In his list he has developed six barriers: anxiety, assuming similarity instead of difference, ethnocentrism, stereotypes and prejudice, nonverbal communication, and

High or low levels of ethnocentricity influence an individual's ability to successfully communicate. Individuals with high ethnocentricity will experience the largest communication barriers with those who are different from them.

A high level or extreme ethnocentrism leads to the rejection of increasing one's knowledge regarding other cultures. One could say it is like having tunnel vision because you are blocking the exchange of new ideas and skills among people and ultimately decreasing communication. This blockage can be very restrictive and constricting.

An example of extreme ethnocentrism is terrorism and hate crime. Terrorism and hate crime occurs when one religion or community believe that they are superior and better than any other religion or community. Ethnocentrism tends to blind these people from seeing from another person's perspective. These differences cause an ethnocentric person to feel amiss with the desire to take action in the form of terror attacks or hate crime.

A less extreme form of ethnocentrism is the lack of interest in learning about other cultures or to recognize what is valuable in other cultures. This is called cultural near-sightedness This is taking your own culture for granted and assuming there is no value in other cultures and neglecting these