What a huge task to talk about cultural differences! I've gathered so many subjects, tried to categorized them myself to go over it piece by piece. But I quickly realized that each piece explains another piece, and that makes it super complicated to put everything together! Then I remembered this great book written by Pascal Baudry, French and Americans, the Other Shore, which I have recommended to many people. But I am about sure that nobody got into it yet, so to make it easier on me, I'm gonna use his own approach on the subject. And I will copy a lot of what he explains, since it's already so well done. After all, there's no need to re-invent the wheel.
American society is explicit, unlike France, which is a country where communication is very implicit. In France, there's a lot of unsaid things, a lot of innuendos, while Americans are very direct, straightforward. "To be able to assimilate within a mere two centuries, in a country as large as Europe, more than two hundred and eighty million foreigners, many of whom were not proficient in the English language, a particular culture has had to develop: in order to be able to act in an efficient and timely manner, people need to be able to ask for information without being judge on the very fact of asking questions or on the way to ask them, and to expect straight answers, stated at the same level as the questions."
Side note: I believe almost every french kid know the embarrassment felt when raising the hand in class, or anywhere else, to ask something. Or maybe it's just me.
"In addition, the founding fathers of the American nation chose to take the opposite course of the British royalist culture, with its vertical structure and its abuses. To that purpose, they set up a system of checks and balances, which is to say a set of procedures whose goal was to prevent any one of the three branches of government from exercising excessive power; that system rests upon a high degree of transparency, and therefore requires a continuous effort to ensure explicitness. Thus, starting from the British culture, which strongly leaned towards implicitness, American culture has become one of the most explicit on the planet. By contrast, French culture, which is older, does not seem to favor the assimilation of foreigners. It can thus afford to judge people based on the questions they ask (on their nature and quality, mode of expression, contextual relevance, the level of proficiency that can be inferred from them, etc..) to fail to answer at the level at which the questions are asked, to respond with critical or mocking innuendos, or even not to answer at all. Thus foreigners will be made to feel that they must somehow earn the right to be admitted into the French culture, through a gradual mastering of un-stated rules. They will be allowed - bit by bit, and at their own risk - to understand that culture from the inside, and later to behave like the natives themselves, including by failing to make the rules explicit for the uninitiated."
So, in the french language, there is a gap between what is said and what is meant because of the implicitness norm, which leaves room for a bunch of stuff that are only implied (allusions, shared historical references, desire, etc..). "Above all, the gap leaves communication open to misunderstandings and disagreements, forcing the participants to pay close attention to the means of relating, at the expense of content." Context is more important than content. Conversely, in the US, everything is always explained in detail. So much that it sometimes seems ridiculous (that is from a french person's point of view, who is gonna think he is being taken for an imbecile).
There's a lot of other disparities that come to mind when thinking of that context vs content theme. Pascal Baudry gives a few of them in his book:
- The French dedicate much attention to their workplace environment, while Americans are willing to work long periods in windowless offices;
- Americans use short sentences to go straight to the point. As far as I'm concerned, I still remember learning, during all my school years, the art of embellishing lonnnnnng useless sentences;
- French people decorate their cities with large numbers of monuments, bury power lines under ground, they design indirect commercials. In America, red lights are often hanging from cables in the middle of intersections, they put up monstrous billboards everywhere to make sure people get the message, and they impose the same grid pattern upon San Francisco's twenty three hills as they would upon any flat city.
 |
| San Francisco |
In America, everything is black or white, you have the good people and the bad people, and not much nuance in between. Or if there is, it is disturbing for a lot of people. Everything is more nuanced in France. The French are well-known to love philosophizing and theorizing EVERYTHING. On the other hand, Americans are very pragmatic, and that would make them more efficient. Well, from a french point of view again, this is debatable...(Don't forget, everything is always debatable from a french point of view...) The Americans' lack of critical sense makes me wonder how efficient they really are. If something is not bad, it's good, and vice versa. So they do get to a result faster, but is it always the best? Anyway, I will just not philosophize on that any longer! I know that I've pissed off more than one person with my French-style theory. To an American person, a clause is either right or wrong. The typical french way to start sentences: "Yes, but.." or "No, but..." drives them crazy. French people play a lot with shades of grey... Americans prefer to go more efficiently towards action.
“As a result, the French tend to be attracted by complexity, Americans by simplicity."
To wrap up, I'm going to quote that book again. It is so packed with good stuff I can't stop: "The reason why French was for several centuries the language spoken at European courts was not because it was the most precise one, as has been claimed, but that it was the one that allowed its speakers to be imprecise in the most precise way." Love it. lol
