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On the other hand, modern society in the Balkans is not culturally homogenous, but
rather divided into layers, since it comprises several different cultures and senses of cultural
awareness. They could be called co-cultures or subcultures, since they share many identical
and/or similar patterns and perception. However, each of these subcultures is different and
specific in its own right in terms of communication and everyday activities. Both the people
who belong to the main (dominant) culture and to the subcultures are necessarily marked by
all public and social cultural traits of their environments; in other words, they are exposed to
constant influences of their „society’s (and/or some of the society’s cultural subgroup’s) public
and cultural representations (with regards to values, norms, traditions etc.” (House 2007: 10),
as well as of their cultural habits. What makes a certain culture unique is that the individual
always shares it with other people who are/have been exposed to similar experiences. Hence,
„culture is to a human collective what personality is to an individual” (Hofstede 2001: 10).
In order to make Balkan societies, being multiethnic communities, function normally, there
must be communication between all their members, i.e. intercultural communication. That
is why studying languages is a good example for emic analysis and seeing the full picture
of culture, since intercultural communication is an integral part of it. Although learning
a foreign language can sometimes be very difficult, stressful and demanding, because it
entails effort and takes time, it also has certain advantages. One of them is the fact that „we
think of our world in different dimensions” (Svitl 2005: 20). Language is the key factor in
investigating our identity (either individual or collective) and in its formation, just as it was
the case with modern Hebrew after Israeli independence in 1948. With the exception of
Judaism as a religious factor, Hebrew was a cohesive force which enabled national unification
and fusion of various Jewish groups that spoke various European languages.
In the so-called limitropic areas of the Balkans, bilingualism and often trilingualism
are strong forms of individuals’ socialization in mixed societies, which enables unity among
population in a relatively small geographical area, usually a region, like for instance Romanian
Banat or Vojvodina viewed as a whole. On the other hand, this kind of linguistic unity can
sometimes turn into bone of contention, which happens if speakers of a language strongly
identify with it, while speakers of another language/languages feel that they are linguistically
or nationally endangered. That is why „communication with the culturally different is
frequently associated with adverse emotional responses leading to feelings of awkwardness
and anxiety” (Spencer–McGovern 2002: 610). Spitzberg is therefore right when he says that
intercultural communication is „behavior that is appropriate and effective in a given context”
(Spitzberg 2009: 381). Kim further developed this postulate, emphasizing that intercultural
communication refers to „the overall internal capability of an individual to manage key
challenging features of intercultural communication: namely, cultural differences and
unfamiliarity, inter-group posture, and the accompanying experience of stress.” (Kim 1991:
259). In brief, „intercultural communication involves interaction between people whose
cultural perceptions and symbol systems are distinct enough to alter the communication
event” (Samovar–Porter–McDaniel 2000: 12). However, in this process of alteration, it is
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