Are There Swedish Patterns of Communication?

An increasing number of people, sometime during their lifetime, have contact with people from different cultures than the ones they are best acquainted with. A very common phenomenon in such contacts is that misunderstandings arise because one has, in some way, projected expectations which are based on one's own culture on the behaviour of others. In order to avoid unjustified projections of this type but also to gain better insight about differences and similarities between different cultures, in general, it is interesting to try to provide better descriptions of different patterns of culture. Especially interesting is to try to provide descriptions of what we could call the pattern of communication of a particular culture. After all, differences in communication are among those things that one immediately is confronted with in contacts with people from another culture. This paper is intended to be a contribution to the description of patterns of communication by describing Swedish patterns of communication, and has three main goals: