SOME ASPECTS OF TUNISIAN AND RUSSIAN COMMUNICATIVE BEHAVIOUR IN AN INTERCULTURAL CONTEXT

The recent decades have witnessed the globalization of various aspects of human life. This context has lead to the removal of physical and intangible borders between peoples. As a result, there emerged a big and rapid growth and expansion of economic exchanges and mobility of human beings, and in particular that of people who flew their homeland for the purpose of working, studying, doing business, or just travelling. It’s important to point out that this human mobility took place, although in a different degree, in both directions, and it might often end up with people settling in new lands, living with people that they didn’t know before and according to new social rules. In this case, it’s clear that the matter goes beyond physical contact between persons to an encounter of heterogeneous cultures. To meet the scientific requirements of this research we stick to the definition of culture given by Ladmiral and Lepiansky. The cultural label such as behaviour, dress, codes, production, norms, values and beliefs make it possible to determine belonguing to a certain cultural community, to a certain social group (Ladmiral J., Lipiansky E., 1995: 8) and Clanet (Clanet C., 1993: 14–15).

In this context the encounter of cultures stimulates intercultural contact and generates intercultural communication, which is understood as a process of relations between cultures, including verbal and non verbal direct interaction between individuals; and also encompassing all the processes of communication linking different cultures (Lusebrink H., 1998: 2).

Today, encounter of Russian and Tunisian cultures is particularly developed in educational, economic and touristic fields. Hundreds of young Tunisians study in Russian universities; thousands of Russian women, married with Tunisians, have settled in Tunisia; hundreds of thousands of Russian tourists regularly visit Tunisia. Often these cultural groups face difficulties during daily contact with the community in which they decided to live. These difficulties are linked primarly to communicative behaviour, either at the level of production or receptivity, and in the majority of cases at both levels. The description of communicative behaviour on the basis of intercultural communication is intended to facilitate the understanding of what is meant by what is said in another culture.

In this article we attempt to draw a comparative and contrastive portrait of some aspects of Tunisian and Russian verbal and non verbal communicative behaviour, a task that can shorten the distance between the two countries and facilitate intercultural communication between their peoples. This work can be perceived as a preliminary step towards a comprehensive description of arab and russian communicatve behaviours.

Keywords: Culture, Communication, Behaviour, Russian, Tunisia