Communication is not information: reflection on culture, language and misunderstandings

Before we get into this properly — no, this is not going to be a post about Austrian culture or whether I personally enjoy living here. Those of you who know me well already know there is plenty to unpack there, so let's save that for later.

But after the past few years navigating life as an immigrant in Austria, I’ve started relating to culture, communication, and identity very differently than I did when living in Sweden. I've always been drawn to the theories and ideas surrounding these topics, and I'd already spent much of my adult life living abroad, but there is a difference between living somewhere temporarily and actually building a life there. Language and culture start off as a struggle you can joke about — the differences, the misunderstandings, the quiet sense of not quite belonging. But at some point it stops being something you use and becomes something you exist through.

And I'm wondering how much that actually changes us?

A good mix of Swedish, German and English speakers is my most common social setting.

Most of us who live outside our home countries build our lives in a second or third language. We work, build relationships, navigate conflict, shape identity, and try to communicate who we are, all while constantly managing an ongoing translation process. Somewhere in that process, meaning will shift.

Working within marketing and communication in an international environment has made me more and more aware of this. My colleagues come from all over the world, bringing different references, cultural frameworks, and communication styles into the same conversations. Which is of course incredibly valuable, but also makes me wonder how much nuance, clarity, and intention quietly disappear between sender and receiver along the way. Especially in professional environments, where both sender and receiver constantly shift between different roles, functions, responsibilities, and audiences, creating room for misunderstanding not only between individuals, but across entire teams, departments, and publics.

One of my biggest frustrations during university — and later transitioning into professional communication work — was how clearly communication theory teaches that communication is not defined by what the sender meant, but by what the receiver understood.

Meaning is always shaped by context, culture, prior knowledge, emotional state, language, timing, and interpretation.

And yet, in practice, I constantly see miscommunication being solved with more information. Longer emails. More meetings. More Teams messages. More documents.

But most of the time, the issue is not lack of information. It is a lack of shared understanding.

Especially in international workplaces, where many of us operate professionally in languages that are not our own, communication becomes less about precision and more about approximation. We understand enough to move forward, but not always enough to fully grasp nuance, intention, or emotional context. And that is rarely about vocabulary or grammar alone, but rather about the associations, experiences, and understanding we attach to the words we use and the knowledge we try to communicate through them.

And I honestly think this impacts organisations more than we realise. It also makes me wonder whether leadership and colleagueship in multilingual and multicultural environments requires an even deeper level of emotional intelligence, communication awareness, and people skills than leadership in more culturally homogeneous teams.

Maybe this is also why I’ve become increasingly interested in branding, storytelling, and communication beyond purely commercial goals. The longer I spend working in this field, the clearer it becomes that the textbooks were right — communication is so little about transmitting information and so much about creating shared understanding.

And perhaps living between languages, cultures, and identities simply makes you more aware of how fragile that understanding actually is.