idioms – Success Across Cultures

Ricky Gervais, Gad Elmaleh, Dave Chappelle, Ken Shimura. Take a look at your favorite comics, and you’ll often find that humor is rooted in shared experiences.

A shared cultural background and community often helps in connecting with what makes humor humorous. Without insider knowledge and localized context, jokes about politics, social norms, and everyday life are totally lost on outsiders.

The slapstick comedy that makes people laugh in one part of the world may leave those in another part rolling their eyes. The sarcasm some cultures find witty may confuse or offend others. And puns aren’t punny to those who don’t know the language or idioms enough to follow.

So, let’s explore humor across several cultures to identify where we might divide or come together.

British Sarcasm: Wit or Confusion?

“Let’s face it, the gene pool needs a little chlorine.” – Jimmy Carr

Irony is the Brits’ cup of tea.

With a dry, understated humor, the Brits have taken sarcasm to the next level.

They love deadpan, banter, innuendo, puns. It’s all part of their wit.

Monty Python is heavy with satire and wordplay. To a Brit, it’s hilarious – because they’ve learned to use sarcasm to deal with life’s sometimes painful and complex aspects.

But to someone unfamiliar with the British way of speaking, their sarcasm can be baffling or even sound like genuine complaining.

Without understanding the cultural context or the delivery, the humor is lost.

Japanese Puns: Wordplay That Falls Flat

In Japanese, puns are called dajare – literally “bad jokes” – and they’re the local version of dad jokes. These rely on homophones and wordplay, often charmingly silly.

Take this classic:

アルミ缶の上にある蜜柑 (arumi kan no ue ni aru mikan)

“A tangerine on an aluminum can.”

It plays on how “arumi kan” (aluminum can) and “aru mikan” (there is a mikan/tangerine) sound nearly identical.

The result? A pun that’s more about the sound than the punchline

As you can see, to a non-Japanese speaker or one who is not fluent, this would just sound like a string of random words without any punchline.

The humor relies on the nuance of Japanese language, which doesn’t translate well into other languages – and this can be said about puns in any language/culture.

When it comes to humor, context truly is king. A joke that causes audiences to double over with laughter in one country may fall flat in another…or may even be deemed offensive.

That’s why understanding humor in a cross-cultural context isn’t just about the words; it’s about the culture that shapes them.

You might be familiar with the idioms, “It’s all Greek to me” and “Burning the midnight oil.”

But do you know the German idiom, “Tomaten auf den Augen haben,” which directly translates to, “You have tomatoes on your eyes,” meaning, “You are not seeing what everyone else can see.”

Probably not.

Linguists and anthropologists, on the other hand, have long known that a link exists between language learning and culture learning.

Dimitrios Thanasoulas in The Importance Of Teaching Culture In The Foreign Language Classroom quotes linguist Claire Kramsch as follows:

“Culture in language learning is not an expendable fifth skill, tacked on, so to speak, to the teaching of speaking, listening, reading, and writing. It is always in the background, right from day one, ready to unsettle the good language learners when they expect it least, making evident the limitations of their hard-won communicative competence, challenging their ability to make sense of the world around them. (Kramsch, 1993: 1)”

To put it simply, learning language is inextricably linked with learning culture, because language = the oral expression of culture.

The pair are fed by one other.

Ming-Mu Kuo and Cheng-Chieh Lai lay this out in Linguistics across Cultures:The Impact of Culture on Second Language Learning:

“Language and culture appear on the surface to be two distinct fields, but they have an intertwined relationship and affect each other mutually…The development of a language frequently affects its associated culture, and cultural patterns of cognition and custom are often explicitly coded in language.”

Culturally, language expresses both our thoughts and how we think.

Kuo and Lai continue:

“Language is also a social institution, both shaping and being shaped by society (Armour-Thomas & Gopaul-McNicol, 1998). This means that language is not an independent construct but social practice both creating and being created by the structures and forces of social institutions within which we live and function.”

What are some structures and social institutions in which language is expressive of culture?

Following are examples of this relationship between culture and linguistics in action.

Family Structures

In this blog, we’ve talked about how the family structures of different cultures are reflected through linguistic terms.

For instance, while in Western cultures, “uncle,” is used to describe both paternal and maternal brothers and, similarly, “cousin” describes those from both sides of the family, this differs in other cultures.

“Cousin” in Yanomani, for instance, is termed dependent on the relationship; “amiwa” for the daughter of a maternal aunt or paternal uncle, “aiwa” for the son of a maternal aunt or paternal uncle, etc.

With such specific familial language terms, it can be deduced that the bloodline matters more in such cultures.

Idioms Express Ideologies

Idioms across cultures can also tell you a lot about the ideology of said culture.

Individualist cultures, for instance, might say, “God helps those who help themselves.”

Such cultures hold lift-yourself-up-by-your-own-bootstraps values. Idioms emphasize individualism and oftentimes capitalism.

“Time is money.”

In contrast, idioms of collectivist cultures often emphasize the group.

One Chinese idiom translates to: “More people produce greater strength.”

This is just one example about how values and norms are reflected in common language, slang, and idiomatic expressions.

Language Learning Aids Cross-Cultural Integration

Knowing how much language informs us about culture itself, it’s clear how paramount language learning is to integration.

Next week, we’ll talk about the three things learning a language will help you demonstrate in your cross-cultural transition.