Light and Salt

allthingslinguistic:

A useful article about communicating compassionately with people who are less fluent in a language you speak well. Excerpt: 

This one is hard but very important: try not to guess the sender’s emotional state. Tone seems off — too abrupt, too vague, too direct? Salutation or closing is a little weird? Word choice seems funky, or maybe way too strong? (A colleague emailed me that she needed a document “desperately”, which I did my best to interpret as “I really need this document ASAP” instead of “I feel a deep, painful longing that will not be fulfilled until I get this document”.) You absolutely have to ignore this and focus on the content. 

Above all, do not tell the other person that their communication style is off-putting. Take a deep breath and have some empathy: apart from the subtleties of expressing emotions in a non-native language, different cultures have very different norms about how much of that emotion should even be reflected in business communication at all. A savvy French friend told me, “Happy Americans send really happy emails; annoyed Americans send pleasant emails. Happy French people send happy emails; annoyed French people send neutral emails. Happy Germans send pleasant emails; annoyed Germans send annoyed emails.” If you’re reading an email and trying to tell whether a non-native speaker is happy or annoyed, you are really shooting in the dark. 

Want to know how they feel? Until you get used to their style, you’ll probably have to do a lot of asking. For example: “Was it a problem for you that I didn’t communicate this deadline earlier?” “Did you think the overall quality of the report was okay?” “Was it all right with you that I started this meeting without you when your train was late?”

Read the whole thing.

This points to a hidden benefit in learning other languages: increased empathy for non-native speakers of a language you already speak well. Sometimes I can say to myself after a few minutes of conversation, “Ah, it feels like this person’s English is around the level of my French [or my Spanish, which are at different levels]. Even though I don’t speak their native language, I can do some of the communicative strategies that I really appreciate when people do them with me in that language.” 

The point about over-inferring tone from text also reminds me of a conversation I recently had about whether ending a text with a period indicates that you’re angry. The person I was talking with said they’d been told they sounded annoyed, but “They know I’m an old person – look at all this grey hair! Why would people assume I know how to communicate something that subtle in a text?”