Three ways language can lead to conflict

Forget false friends, these can create enemies.

Photo by Todd Cravens on Unsplash

I’ve had my fair share of cultural and linguistic no-nos. When you travel a fair amount and find yourself mixing with people from all different places, you can’t always avoid making a mistake.

You may be the most culturally aware person, and do everything you can to follow the local norms, but ultimately there’s always room for a small mistake. Whether it’s patting a child on the head, using the wrong pronoun to address an elder or not knowing the difference between veg and pure veg, most of the time a little apology and understanding fixes the mistake.

However, I have seen language cause conflicts on a number of occasions. Most of them an argument or a bicker, but isn’t that how many things start and escalate. I was reminded of a few of these recently, so here are three ways language can cause people to lose their calm.

Getting the wrong end of the stick

The joy and the problem with language is all of that nuance. This nuance that for one language can change from region to region, and sometimes is even lost by a native speaker.

Generational gaps don’t help either, with some words used in their time having a completely different meaning now. Some…