biergarten, it may be enough to say, “Noch eins, bitte” (“Another one, please”). The
waiter knows that I just drank a stein of Löwenbräu Original, or that customers who
speak with a foreign accent nearly always want the city’s most famous beer. Because my
remark is meaningful only in context, it is an example of high-context communication.
As a rule, cultures with western European roots rely more heavily on low-context
communication. These include Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States,
as well as much of Europe. The rest of the world tends toward high-context
communication. Naturally, high-context communication can occur in a low-context
culture, as the German biergarten illustrates. Communication within a family or close-
knit group is high context in almost any part of the world. Conversely, low-context
communication is becoming more common in high-context cultures, due to Western
influences and a desire to accommodate travelers and expatriates.
One of the more obvious markers of a low-context culture is the proliferation of signs and
written instructions. If I step off the train in Munich, there are signs everywhere to direct
me to the taxi stand, public transportation, ticket offices, tourist information, and
lavatories. Detailed street maps of the area are mounted on the walls, and bus and tram
schedules are posted. In much of the high-context world, there is little such information.
Nonetheless everyone seems already to know where to go and what to do. Much of what
one must know to operate is absorbed from the culture, as if by osmosis. In these parts of
the world, my hosts normally send someone to meet me on the platform, partly as a
gesture of hospitality, but also because they are accustomed to providing information
through a social context rather than impersonal signs. I am much less likely to be greeted
in a German airport or station, not because Germans are inhospitable, but because they
transmit information in a different way.
It may appear that low-context communication is simply an outgrowth of urbanization
and international travel, rather than a cultural trait. These are certainly factors, but there
is an irreducible cultural element as well. The smallest town in the United States
carefully labels every street with a street sign and numbers the buildings consecutively,
even though practically everyone in sight has lived there a lifetime and can name the
occupants of every house. Yet very few streets in the huge city of Tokyo are labeled or
even have names, and building numbers are nonexistent or arranged in random order.
The United States and Japan are perhaps the world’s most extreme cases of low-context
and high-context cultures, respectively.
International travel and migration likewise fail to explain low-context and high-context
behavior, even if they are factors. It is true that international airports are now well signed
in most of the world. Yet there are few areas with a more transient and multicultural
population than some of the Arab Gulf states, in which perhaps less than twenty percent
of the population is indigenous. Communication nonetheless remains largely high
context. Local authorities may post directional signs at roundabouts, in an effort to
accommodate Western tourists and expatriates, but these are remarkably useless—no
doubt because the local people never rely on signs and therefore do not really know what
it means to navigate by them.