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Literature on face‐to‐face intercultural business communication (IBC) suggests that language, culture, business culture, and interpersonal context variables lead to misunderstandings, but these predictors have not been studied with regard to e‐mail communication. This exploratory study identifies variables that cause e‐mail miscommunication, reduce work accomplishment, and harm business relationships. We conducted a survey to capture the effect of common predictors and asked respondents to share the most commonly employed strategies when communication problems arose. We offer a multi‐dimensional model for further research.

The purpose of this study is to examine how tweeters drawn from three different languages and cultural boundaries manage the lack of contextual cues through an analysis of Arabic, English and Korean tweets.

Data for this study is drawn from a corpus of tweets (n = 1,200) streamed using Python through Twitter API. Using the language information, the authors limited the number of tweets to 400 randomly selected tweets from each language, totaling 1,200 tweets. Final coding taxonomy was derived through interactive processes preceded by literature and a preliminary analysis based on a small subset (n = 150) by isolating nonverbal communication devices and emoticons.

The results of the study present that there is great commonality across these tweets in terms of strategies and creativity in compensating for the constraints imposed by the tweet platform. The language-specific characteristics are also shown in the form of different usage of devices.

Emoticon usage indicates that the communication mode influences online social interaction; the restriction of 140 maximum characters seems to engender a frequent usage of emoticons across tweets regardless of language differences. The results of the study bring forth implications into the design of social media technologies that reflect affective aspects of communication and language-/culture-specific traits and characteristics.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, there are no qualitative studies examining paralinguistic nonverbal communication cues in the Twitter platform across language boundaries.

This article reports the outcomes of a study on communication support, commissioned to develop a borough‐wide strategy in 2003 by the London Borough of Tower Hamlets.The research stems from a recognition of communication as a key to successful delivery of public services and enhancement of a multicultural community.The focus is on ‘communication’ (rather than ‘language’), since it captures issues beyond the exchange of information through words: interpersonal interactions and relationships, techniques and modes of organising information exchange. Language is a key component within the broad ambit of communication mechanism and skills. Hence interpretation and translation are perceived as models of communications support alongside advocacy, integrated team, multilingual professional team, family/friends and minors, supported language, symbols and signs, and Plain English.While engaging in the debate and highlighting some of the broader issues concerning communication support services, the focus is on the following main issues:• policy frameworks and guiding principles in communication support• methods and techniques for needs assessment, monitoring and evaluation of communication support• communication support provision in Tower Hamlets including quantifying need, actual state of provision and users' perceptions.Probably among the first of its kind, the strategy draws on existing knowledge and good practice to develop a common framework for public services in Tower Hamlets. It is believed that it will serve a pioneering role in co‐ordinated existing and developing coherent approaches to communication support.

Effective communication is a key factor in presenting Human Immunodeficiency Virus/Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (HIV/AIDS) awareness and prevention campaigns, and delivering treatment programmes, particularly in South Africa where different ethnic groups and a diversity of languages and educational attainment levels are encountered. Language is an important element of such communication. The purpose of this paper is to examine the communication effectiveness of AIDS-related intervention messages.

Case-based semi-structured interviews, with 42 employees from three construction organisations, and with six telephone counsellors from a service provider, were used to explore language in the HIV/AIDS context in the construction industry in the Western Cape region.

Workers’ knowledge about HIV (a key element in prevention and willingness to engage in treatment regimes) tended to align with their level of education. African cultures may inhibit the use of plain language about AIDS. Graphic posters with text in different languages were the most preferred communication media, but need periodic refreshment to remain effective. For toolbox talks and other company presentations, a comprehensive approach to language differences is limited, and appropriate confirmatory feedback loops are not used – the message sent is not always the message received. The recruitment and training processes for service provider counsellors ensure a more comprehensive grasp of HIV knowledge and a more consistent approach to communication.

Construction organisations should be more careful in their HIV/AIDS campaigns and programmes, ensure better targeting of audiences and pay more nuanced and sensitive attention to language needs, gender differences and cultural contexts with respect to communicating with workers in ways that engage them more fully about HIV/AIDS, stigma and disclosure.

Communication effectiveness is pivotal in the provision of intervention management by construction firms. Ineffective language and communication processes directly and adversely influence HIV/AIDS intervention management success.

The international firms' management of subsidiaries abroad necessarily implies the question of how to manage language problems. Even if this is obvious, only a few researchers have dealt with the problem of language skills in corporate communications as this paper will show. This paper will furthermore discuss how Danish firms with subsidiaries in France solve their language problems. The paper points out different kinds of solutions to the language problems and shows the consequences of these solutions. Typically the firms have no language strategy, which results in a muddling‐through the day‐to‐day problems of how to communicate.

The aim of this paper is to discuss a theoretical framework for increased integration of a company's communication policy, corporate language policy and corporate information portal with a view to facilitating communication management.

The paper draws on selected theoretical contributions on corporate language policy with special emphasis on theoretical considerations on the type of language policies developed and implemented in companies and organisations and on corporate communication with special emphasis on van Riel's common starting points. The empirical basis of the paper is a triangulation of questionnaire data, content analysis data and interview data.

The paper argues that corporate communication has not sufficiently included the operational part of a company's corporate communication. The paper makes the case for a theoretical integration framework based on van Riel's common starting points (CSPs), and argues that corporate communication also needs to include the corporate language policy and the corporate information portal, defined as a modern information directory offering communicators concrete communication data for use in concrete text production situations.

The paper proposes a CSP‐based theoretical integration framework and makes the case for a Holy Trinity in corporate communications based on the communication policy, the corporate language policy and the corporate information portal.

Multicultural organizations are often argued to hold potential knowledge resources that can be used to increase performance. However, while only a few studies have been undertaken on the subject, linguistic differences are argued to make the use of knowledge and the sharing of knowledge a challenge in multicultural organizations. This study seeks to explore the relationships between language, knowledge sharing and performance.

A questionnaire was directed electronically to members of academic multicultural departments in Denmark.

Results showed that consistency in English management communication was the dominating factor with strong relationships with all of the investigated knowledge sharing and performance variables. English communication consistently had an association with some of the knowledge sharing and performance variables but not with all of them. The number of languages and the communication frequency were generally positively associated with the outcome variables.

This study targeted multicultural academic organizations. The findings may not be generalizable to other organizations.

Results indicate that multicultural organizations should support consistent English communication in general and English management communication in particular.

Since there are no similar large‐scale studies on the intra‐unit management of language diversity, the findings may be of considerable theoretical and practical importance.

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the utility of systemic functional linguistics (SFL) as an underlying model to examine the similarities/differences between spoken and written peer-to-peer (P2P) communication.

An embedded mixed methods experimental design with linguistically standardized experimental stimuli was used to expose the basic linguistic differences between P2P communications that can be attributed to communication medium (spoken/written) and product type (hedonic/utilitarian).

The findings show, empirically, that consumer’s spoken language is not linguistically equivalent to that of written language. This confirms that the capability of language to convey semantic meaning in spoken communication differs from written communication. This study extends the characteristics that differentiate hedonic from utilitarian products to include lexical density (i.e. hedonic) vs lexical sparsity (i.e. utilitarian).

The findings of this study are not wholly relevant to other forms of consumer communication (e.g. viral marketing). This research used a few SFL resources.

This research shows that marketers should ideally apply a semantic approach to the analysis of communications, given that communication meaning can vary across channels. Marketers may also want to focus on specific feedback channels (e.g. review site vs telephone) depending on the depth of product’s details that need to be captured. This study also offers metrics that advertisers could use to classify media and to characterize consumer segments.

This research shows the relevance of SFL for understanding P2P communications and has potential applications to other marketing communications.

The purpose of this study is to contribute to the field of diversity studies with novel insights on how language diversity and communication frequency influence dissimilarity attitudes.

The authors examine language diversity and communication frequency as group‐level antecedents for positive dissimilarity attitudes by use of questionnaire responses from 489 members of academic culturally diverse departments.

The results showed that communication frequency has strong positive relationships with three variables depicting positive dissimilarity attitudes, namely openness to linguistic, visible and informational diversity. Contradicting our predictions, language diversity had positive associations with all variables portraying positive dissimilarity attitudes. The implications of these findings are discussed in detail.

Few prior studies have dealt with the relations between language, communication and dissimilarity attitudes.

This article aggregates and reviews the disparate information needed to assess journal literature related to communication disorders both directly and peripherally. An extensive analysis was performed using a list of 40 journals on communication disorders derived from a review of selected libraries’ journal collections, and then compared to entries in respected indexes and bibliographies covering this discipline. The result of this analysis is a list providing comprehensive information including scope and coverage, publisher information, indexing/abstracting data, and online availability for those 40 journals. In addition, a survey was conducted among communication disorders faculty in the City University of New York (CUNY) to investigate which professional journals are used regularly for current awareness and for clinical/research information. The information presented in this article should be of interest to faculty, students and practitioners in this area, as well as subject librarians responsible for collection development.