INTERCOMPREHENSION – LANGUAGE TOOLS FOR INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATION
INTERCOMPREHENSION – LANGUAGE TOOLS FOR INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATION

Summary/Abstract: Speaking about the importance of intercultural communication in our globalised world has become more than obvious. Independently of the personal, social or professional context of our lives, our daily interactions are no more limited to the geographical small sphere of our nations or regions, but have to be placed in a much larger world which is characterised by diversity (ies). The language of communication is very often taken for granted: it seems we have only one option, English. However, the use of English in intercultural encounters is not the only possibility, and in many cases it may become a barrier to cultural awareness and to the actual needs of effective communication. How can we conciliate the naïve use of an international language and Wittgengstein’s aphorism 19 (1953) «(…) to imagine a language means to imagine a form of life»? Intercomprehension, a quite recent concept that has been developed since the 1990’s, may help us to find other ways to communicate that allow deeper understanding of otherness and the respect for cultural specificities, which include language use. In our paper, we will present this notion and analyse its effects on a new perspective of intercultural communication.

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