Spencer Schaulis - Final Blog Post

For this blog post we were asked to describe a relationship with a friend that does not share our same culture.  This should be easy for all of us seeing how we attend a university with the diversity of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.  For me, I chose to discuss my relationship with a friend I met in my dorm this fall.

I met my friend Scottie Ngoh early last fall.  Scottie was born in Africa, but moved to the US at an early age.  Although he is mostly custom to American customs, he does have a slight accent.  Me and Scottie are the same age and are both males.  Scottie also grew up in an average class family as did I.  We also share the same sexual orientation in that we both like woman.  Scottie was born in a French-African colony in West Africa, hence his French accent.

When I first came to college, I didn't have many friends of different cultures because I came from a rural area with essentially only American farmers.  When I came to college I was skeptical on making friends of different cultures, not because I am racists or have anything against other cultures, but because frankly I've never had a friend of a different race or ethnicity.  I didn't know what to expect or how to act.  Now that I have friends of different cultures, I feel as if there are no challenges and or differences between us.  There are clearly many benefits of having a friend in a different culture.  To name a few: you learn about different cultures and how they act and who doesn't want to meet more people and expand their amount of friends.

The reason me and my friend Scottie are good friends is because we act the same way when we are around each other.  We talk to each other the same way, and treat each other the same way.  Our dialect is a very vital key to why we can maintain a strong friendship.  Baxter established four different categories for dialect: contradiction, change, praxis, and totality.  For the first categories, contradiction, the only contradiction me and my friend Scottie have are our race and ethnicity.  Other than that me and Scottie are essentially the same people.

Martin, J.N., & Nakayama, T.K. (2012). Intercultural Communication in Contexts (6^th ed.) Boston, MA: McGraw Hill.

http://zimmer.csufresno.edu/~johnca/spch100/10-10-baxter.htm