A familiar feeling? You take courses, study a foreign language, try to speak with native speakers, carefully choosing your words, and in response you get a calm, grammatically perfect phrase. And it seems like nothing outright bad was said, but there remains such a residue that you have just been elegantly sent to hell, informs Ukr.Media.
It turns out it's not just our collective paranoia. Scientists recently published a study in the journal Lingua about why we react so strongly to other people's “rudeness” in multilingual environments.
They gathered native English speakers and those for whom it was a second language, showed them videos with typical workplace dramas — someone interrupting someone, someone imposing their opinion — and asked them to rate the level of rudeness.
The result turned out to be quite interesting, although natural: people who communicate in a non-native language see aggression and disrespect where locals see ordinary routine.
And the point is not that someone knows the dictionary worse or doesn't understand the meaning of the idiom.
When our brain is working at high speed just to put words in the right order, it quickly gets exhausted and starts looking for clues in other things — in facial expressions, gestures, intonation. We cling to visual signals. And when you are internally tense (because speaking a language that is not your own is always a bit stressful), any raised eyebrow or sigh from the interlocutor seems like a signal to attack. The brain seems to be over-insures itself and interprets the incomprehensible as hostile.
For a long time, there was a convenient theory that we feel less emotion in a foreign language. They say that someone else's insults or swear words don't hit as hard. Researchers prove the opposite. Emotions hit with the same force, especially when it comes to basic categories: fairness, contempt, or outright bullying. Anger is still anger, no matter what language you analyze it in. We don't react to syntax, we react to violations of our ideas about what is normal.
There is also a cultural gap here. For many Western or Eastern cultures, politeness is the art of going in circles, using dozens of mitigating constructions and avoiding the word “no”. And for us, for example, straightforwardness is often synonymous with honesty. Why waste other people's time on verbal curtseys, if you can say it directly? But what is normal for us may seem shockingly harsh to a German or an American.
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