Abstract
If the average Englishman walks around with a mental picture of himself playing cricket in the middle of an island, then the French equivalent will be of himself eating in the upper part of a regular six-sided figure, a hexagon. The grain of truth involved in such a picture is as awkward to define or refine as is the irritation we feel when faced with the impossibility of communicating across the Channel, whether in a seminar in which people we thought were colleagues seem to completely lack understanding of the first principles of discussion, or in friendly chit-chat which suddenly reveals gulfs of misunderstanding. Yet French and English speakers are brought up within a European culture: we have common ancestors, spiritual in the Greeks and the Christians and even physical in a thousand years of invasions and conflicts; why and whence the problems? Why should it be that the French and the English find it so difficult to work together even on co-operative projects like Concorde, that the French should strive so hard to get the Americans out of their country, that the European Community is so frequently shaken by Franco-British disagreements? The present paper examines some of the aspects of the French which the ‘Anglo-Saxons’ find difficult to comprehend—or to stomach.
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Ager, D.E. (1983). The French: A Cross-cultural Comparison. In: Singleton, W.T. (eds) Social Skills. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-7819-8_16
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-7819-8_16
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
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