Eighteenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

Concomitant with globalization, cultural exchanges within and without the U.S. borders have reached historically high levels. Intercultural encounters have now become much more frequent and commonplace for all residents as the U.S. has now quickly turned into a multicultural and multilingual nation (Johnson, 1999). Although there is no overtly stated official language policy in the U.S. at the federal level, its linguistic culture is such that it only welcomes American English (Schiffman, 1996). From a dialectical perspective of intercultural communication competence (Martin, 2015), this paper analyzes the U.S. linguistic culture of “covert language policy,” and reveals the most significant barriers to advancing Americans’ intercultural communication competence to be its covert language policy embedded in the current U.S. linguistic culture. Given that languages are expressions of cultures (Sharifian and Jamarani, 2013), findings of this study suggest an adoption of a language policy that will not only promote linguistic diversity in the U.S., but also advance Americans’ intercultural communication competence, as the adopted policy will ultimately alter the current U.S. linguistic culture.