Intercultural communication barriers are increasing in today’s changing world.

The most challenging

issue is proper communication with diverse culture people. In today’s workplace, a lot of problems arise
because of cultural barriers. Most of the common barriers those people faced in their multicultural
settings are-misunderstanding, , religion variances, language difficulty, anxiety, uncertainty, nonverbal
misinterpretations, ethnocentrism, lack of intercultural communication skills and lack of training
knowledge in workplace. In our introduction part we mentioned about language as we think that it’s the
main barrier that student or leaders faced everywhere. Therefore we focused more in language problem.
However The other barriers we will explain here now-

Language: It is a big barrier of intercultural communication if ones don’t understand the messages of
another no one can communicate. The message or word varies one culture to another.

Misunderstanding and Nonverbal misinterpretations:

While working in a multicultural setting misunderstanding is a common barrier when we communicate
with people from diverse culture as their value and belief differ. Sometimes they failed to understand that
person to person value and belief vary which depends on their culture. Nonverbal communication is a
barrier where we don’t use words. It depends on gestures, eye contact, body language, facial movements
and so on. These types of message can be misinterpreted simply. According to jandt (2001) there are
many ways to use nonverbal communication where the first one considered as replacing spoken message.

Prejudices: It is a notable communication barrier when an Individual join one cultures to another culture
his/her norms and culture are not same as like new culture at this moment they face prejudice challenge.
Lack of proper communication and interaction is there a pre-judgment pass in such cross culture setting.
Only because of prejudge irrational perception created and its breakdown the communication pattern.
According to Jandt (2010), prejudice refers to irrational hatred – a gap that is created on the basis of
hatred following a certain group, religion, cast or race. In this way, prejudice is inevitable blockage of
cross-cultural communication as it is a source to augment victimization of certain groups. When
victimization is there definitely lack of communication is there too
Prejudice defines dislike and distrust people without any reason, who are not similar to you different in
some way. Especially reason can be sex, religious, race.

Stereotypes: when we don’t know anything about a people or situation .we need to make a judgment
about people or situation. Without knowing the full scenario stereotypes allow us to make a comment it
can be positive and negative. Actually it is based on half-picture. A judgment with incomplete
information toward a culture makes a barrier among communication.
Anxiety and Uncertainty in: When a person doesn’t know how to act or behave in some situation
obviously the communications fail here. So it is another barrier of commutation because only fall in
anxiety when he is not in his/her own culture.
Ethnocentrism: Ethnocentrism is a belief where individual give superiority on their own culture. This
involves negative approach toward another culture when peoples judge something.
When peoples interact with another person from other culture they reject the opinion of that person and
they evaluate the situation on the basis of their own point of view. In some rare cases Ethnocentrism is
related to racism (Coopman and Lull).

Assuming Similarity: In different culture if people are acting like home manner obviously it is creates a
lot of problems. It is very important to know about cultural norms, habit, law before act. So It in an
another barrier of communication.

Jandt, F. E. (2001). Intercultural communication: An introduction (third ed.). Thousand Oaks: Sage