Introduction

This paper reports on research involving the fine-grained qualitative analysis of interactions between Afrikaans and English speakers in South Africa, in the medium of English. The goal of this research is to see whether the explanation of the sources and consequences of miscommunication between Zulu and English speakers offered in Chick (1985) holds for Afrikaans and English speakers as well. The essence of this explanation is that a mis-match of culturally-preferred interactional styles contributes to asynchrony (see Erickson 1975, 1976, 1978), in the context of which participants misinterpret and misevaluate one another, and that repeated miscommunication of this sort generates negative cultural stereotypes. Asynchrony is the antithesis of conversational synchrony which, Erickson (1975) explains, is the rhythmic patterning of conversationalists' coordinated behaviour that enables them to judge the occurrence in real time of significant ‘next moments’. This information they need in order to accomplish conversational inferencing. As a great number of studies have shown (e.g. Gumperz 1982a, 1982b; Pride 1985), intercultural communication is frequently characterised by asynchrony in which the participants look, sound and feel clumsy, and often miss one another's signals because they occur at unexpected moments. In this paper I present evidence which suggests that, indeed, a mismatch of interactional styles is partly responsible for the asynchrony in the encounters analysed, and I suggest what some of the distinctive features of these putative styles are.