A fairly well known phenomenon in linguistics is that even when a language or dialect is known for having a tendency for something in particular, it also has tendencies towards the opposite in other areas.

Example: English speakers think of Spanish as unusually gender-obsessed, because it has many gender-specific things that aren’t gender-specific in English. All nouns are either masculine or feminine, and many adjectives can’t be used without specifying the gender of whoever or whatever they describe.

But at the same time, Spanish also sometimes goes genderless for things that are gender-specific in English. For instance the dative pronoun “le,” which can mean “him” or “her,” and the possessive pronoun “su,” meaning either “his” or “her,” as well as “their,” “its,” or “your.” And the fact that most sentences can be said with the subject pronoun totally omitted, letting context provide any needed clues to who is being talked about and what their gender may be.

Similarly, dialects that tend to add some extra sounds will also omit other sounds. Jokes tend to simplify and stereotype, of course, but there’s a certain joke about Southern US dialects that actually happens to showcase that duality. It refers to an Alabaman who pronounces the state name “Ay-a-la-bay-a-ma,” and knows only one single-syllable word, “Yerp” –which is a pronunciation of “Europe.”

Linguists caution against making quick, sweeping statements about a language or dialect… partly because of this sort of thing.

See, our perceptions about another language are based on what we find strange and different in comparison to our own language. And, if we actually give it enough thought before making that sweeping judgement, we’ll notice that these differences usually don’t all go the same direction.

I think this is also true of culture.

I come from Minnesota, a region that’s notorious for concealing emotions, talking behind others’ backs, and expecting people to guess things from subtle cues. But I’ve seen people do those things in all the other places I’ve lived, too.

And not even necessarily to different degrees. I mean, it’s hard to measure and quantify a thing like “passive-aggressiveness” or “subtle hints,” so I hesitate to say one culture has MORE tendency towards those things than another.

To me it feels clearer that they happen differently. And often in ways that seem to me like more of a minefield than my home culture.

For example, when I lived in Pennsylvania it felt to me like a double standard for empathy and theory of mind. I felt that people expected others to read their minds at least as much as Minnesotans did– and got more angry when they didn’t– but, at the same time, made less of their own effort to theorize the mental state of others.

(Of course, this may have been an effect of my being an outsider and not recognizing people’s attempts to understand. Or, maybe, just being a difficult person for them to understand.)

Sometimes the difference is that the hints and subtleties happen in different contexts, just like the gendered words in Spanish and the extra syllables in Alabaman. And other times the difference is that one person’s “stating outright” is another person’s “subtly hinting.”

If I say “the dishes haven’t been done yet,” there are people who’ll take that as a overly confrontational demand, and others who’ll interpret it as a neutral statement of fact that may or may not be relevant to them. Even “Could you do the dishes?” feels like tricky subtleness to some of the most literal-minded, since it doesn’t overtly communicate “I want you to do them”– and anything that communicated that with total clarity would feel like downright verbal abuse to some of the most sensitive.

Those examples, of course, are ones that usually come up between people of different neurotypes. I used them to illustrate the concept because they’re so marked. Differences between cultures and regions tend to be less obvious and harder to describe… but they happen in much the same way, with similar effects.

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