I had a personal encounter with conversational norms different from those accepted in my culture when, on one occasion, I met a recent arrival from Eastern Europe. After I inquired, “How are you?” my interlocutor began describing the problems in his professional life. It was a notable deviation from “I am fine, thank you, how are you?” that I would expect as an answer. Samovar et al. point out that most cultures use “small talk,” but, apparently, they still differ with regards to when and how one should employ it.
In my case, a person interpreted “How are you?” not as a standardized polite greeting but as an actual invitation to tell about himself and, by doing so, unknowingly violated a conversational norm. Another example comes from the movie The School of Rock, directed by Linklater and produced by Rudin. The plot revolves around Dewey Finn, a musician who impersonates a school teacher and starts a rock band together with his students. In one scene, Finn tries to instill the rebellious spirit of rock and roll into his wards and, as an exercise, motivates them to deny his authority.
This initiative promptly results in students calling him a stupid fat loser and telling him to get out. In the comedic setting of the movie, this earns Finn’s approval, as it was the exact point of the exercise. However, in an actual school, such insults would be a clear violation of classroom decorum and, therefore, of conversational norms of the students’ own culture. When examined together, these cases demonstrate that cultural identity always remains a relevant factor when using language.
As indicated by my experience, people from different cultural backgrounds may assign profoundly different meanings to the same phrase in the same language. Consequently, speech acts assume social significance depending on the speakers’ cultural backgrounds: the students’ insults toward Finn become a rebellious act of young rockers precisely because their culture finds them a violation of a conversational norm.