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In Southern Africa, communication regularly takes place across the boundaries drawn by the region’s rich cultural and linguistic diversity. Such communication is found, for instance, where people with different languages communicate using another, shared language; or where people with the same first language, but different cultures, communicate with one another. These and other forms of intercultural communication – which are not limited to Southern Africa, but are increasingly found on a global level – occur in a wide range of domains (e.g. health, education, business, public affairs, law, religion and private life) and often result in misunderstandings across cultures caused by different conceptions of politeness, conversational interaction, etc. It stands to reason that success in the various domains presupposes an understanding of the central features of intercultural communication.
Clearly, then, there is a great need for postgraduate linguistics programmes in which the phenomenon of intercultural communication is studied from a range of disciplinary perspectives.