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High and Low Context Cultures

One framework to approach intercultural communication is context cultures. First, the
concept of context cultures was introduced by Edward T. Hall stated in his book “The Silent
Language” (1959). This can refer to the value cultures of indirect and direct communication. The
context of the message that involves with great importance to structuring actions are referred to
high context. High context cultures are usually relational. It pays attention to interpersonal
relationships. Hall defined high-context people as those who prefer well-being of the group than
individual ones. While, the context that concerns direct messages is low context. In low-context
cultures, the communication between the members is usually explicit and direct.The conversation
is more dependent on the words spoken rather than the interpretation of the unexpressed cues.

Figure 1 Comparison of high and low context cultures.

The Figure 1 above explains the kind of behavior that is generally found in high and low
context cultures within eight categories; for example, how people express to each other, how they
realize their failure, how they communicate with each other, how they express the reaction, how
they treat space, how they treat time. One thing to remember is that few cultures and the people
in them are totally at one end of the spectrum or the other. They usually fall somewhere in
between and may have a combination of high and low context characteristics.

Since each country has its own culture, the way people act to each other will be different.
For example, asian countries such as Thailand, Japan, and China and other countries including
Egypt, Saudi Arabia, France, Italy and Spain are high context. In contrast, countries such as the US,
UK, Canada, Germany, Denmark and Norway are low context. However, when we look closely at
each scale of that country, we can see that some scales are classified as high context but others
are low context. In Japan, most Japanese people are highly contextual in the scale of
communication about indirect negative feedback, persuading applications first, hierarchical, and
avoiding confrontation. But they will be low context in consensual deciding and scheduling time

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