Choice of language

Language difficulties can obviously hamper communication between people who have

different national languages. Regional dialects can also, and predictably, complicate

matters. However, there can be many other and more subtle language problems even

between people who are from the same country’, region and class. Technical language

may be used. in discussion which is beyond the comprehension of some of the

participants. In any organisation there are likely to be abbreviations, words with special

connotations, and ‘in-terms’ whose meaning is

taken for granted by those inside the organisation. A

colleague of mine recently gave an example of two nurses trying to communicate about

sterilisation policies in their respective parts of the Health Service. One was a midwife

and the other a community nurse. It took a quarter of an hour before they realised that

one was talking about sterilisation as a means of. birth control and the other about

sterilisation as a means of protecting babies from infection! Problems of language

invariably get exposed in the rectangles drawing exercise previously explained. The

diagram may be explained by the use of geometric language, points of the compass, the

hands of a clock or the use of symbols such as ‘L shaped’ and ‘an inverted V’. The

language chosen by the instructor is likely to be more convenient to some people than

others and a person’s ability to understand the instructor will in part depend on whether

the instructor chooses a language convenient to him or not

The recurring problem with language in communication is that the person who is trying to

explain something may understandably use the language that is most convenient to

himself without perhaps realising that

there. is a choice of language.