Unmuted by Hansen Heather;

Author:Hansen, Heather;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

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• View English as a tool to connect instead of a symbol of identity or source of power.

• Listen to the meaning of the message, not how it is communicated.

• Focus on connection, not perfection.

10

Understand and be understood

‘You talk funny.’

‘What do you mean, I “talk funny”?’ I snapped back at my childhood friend, Nyrene.

‘I don’t know. It’s weird. You sound different. Why are you talking like that?’

It took a while to understand what Nyrene meant. It was my first Christmas back in California after moving to Denmark in mid-2002. I couldn’t imagine I had changed so much that I sounded foreign to her. It was hard for her to point out what was wrong. We finally deciphered the problem when we were wandering through the aisles of a bookstore and I pointed to a book, ‘Hey, have you read this?’

‘There! You just did it! We don’t say it like that!’

She repeated my words, exaggerating my tone and lifting the pitch on ‘read’: ‘Have you read this?’

I was still confused. She clarified: ‘We say, “Have you read this?”’ with an overexaggerated rising tone at the end of the question.

It took me a second to understand what was going on. At the time I was learning Danish and was having trouble feeling the intonation patterns. I came up with the idea to speak English (mostly in my head) with Danish intonation so I could start to ‘feel’ the language. I guess it had worked a little better than planned, because what Nyrene heard was me using a Danish intonation pattern on top of my English.

Once I realized what I was doing, I managed to switch back and started speaking ‘normally’ again. But I’ve noticed that every time I go back to the US, I sound more and more unlike the people around me, and I need to work harder and harder to sound ‘normal’ to them. After over 20 years of living in international environments, I have naturally changed the way I speak. Most of the changes happened subconsciously. Some were conscious decisions. All were with the intention of being best understood by everyone everywhere. It’s in our interest to learn how to communicate as clearly as possible. By adapting our speech in subtle but powerful ways, we can be understood on the first try, every time. You might think that native speakers have an advantage and are easily understood, but we know that native speakers can be some of the most difficult to understand in international settings due to relaxed speech patterns, idioms and colloquialisms.

In a world that is increasingly global and interconnected, you don’t even need to leave your living room to chat with colleagues, vendors or friends on the other side of the world. If we all make an effort to speak clearly and listen consciously, we can build stronger, more efficient teams that focus on inclusion and understanding.

Every conversation is a negotiation

On the global stage, every conversation is a new negotiation of meaning depending on who is speaking, who is listening and the context in which they are speaking.

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