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How the Finnish Survive Without Small Talk (bbc.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: Finnish people often forgo the conversational niceties that are hard-baked into other cultures, and typically don't see the need to meet foreign colleagues, tourists and friends in the middle. As Tiina Latvala, a former English instructor in Sodankyla, Lapland, explained, part of her job was to introduce her young students to the concept of small talk. "We had a practice where you had to pretend to meet someone for the first time," Latvala said. "You had to pretend you were meeting at the cafe or on a bus and [that] you didn't know each other and do a bit of chit chat. We had written on the whiteboard all the safe topics so they didn't have to struggle with coming up with something to talk about. We brainstormed. They usually found it really difficult."
"[They're] about basic conversation," she explained. "The answers are already there. We are taught to answer 'I'm great, how about you?'; 'How is your mum?'. It was very clear how to be in a conversation, as if we didn't already know. It was very weird as if there were right answers to the questions." There are more hypotheses than answers for why Finnish culture has a veil of silence permanently stitched in place. Latvala believes their trademark directness has something to do with the complexity of the Finnish language and the fairly large distance between cities (Latvala's reasoning: If you've travelled any distance to see someone, why waste time?). [...] It isn't for lack of skill, for Finland has two national languages -- Finnish and Swedish -- and Finns begin English lessons when they're six or seven. But rather it's because when faced with expressing themselves in second (or third) language, many often choose to not say anything rather than risk not being fully understood. However, when among their own, silence functions as an extension of comfortable conversation. "'It's not about the structure or features of the language, but rather the ways in which people use the language to do things,' Dr Anna Vatanen, a researcher at the University of Oulu, explained via email. 'For instance, the 'how are you?' question that is most often placed in the very beginning of an encounter. In English-speaking countries, it is mostly used just as a greeting and no serious answer is expected to it. On the contrary, the Finnish counterpart (Mita kuuluu?) can expect a 'real' answer after it: quite often the person responding to the question starts to tell how his or her life really is at the moment, what's new, how they have been doing.'"
"[They're] about basic conversation," she explained. "The answers are already there. We are taught to answer 'I'm great, how about you?'; 'How is your mum?'. It was very clear how to be in a conversation, as if we didn't already know. It was very weird as if there were right answers to the questions." There are more hypotheses than answers for why Finnish culture has a veil of silence permanently stitched in place. Latvala believes their trademark directness has something to do with the complexity of the Finnish language and the fairly large distance between cities (Latvala's reasoning: If you've travelled any distance to see someone, why waste time?). [...] It isn't for lack of skill, for Finland has two national languages -- Finnish and Swedish -- and Finns begin English lessons when they're six or seven. But rather it's because when faced with expressing themselves in second (or third) language, many often choose to not say anything rather than risk not being fully understood. However, when among their own, silence functions as an extension of comfortable conversation. "'It's not about the structure or features of the language, but rather the ways in which people use the language to do things,' Dr Anna Vatanen, a researcher at the University of Oulu, explained via email. 'For instance, the 'how are you?' question that is most often placed in the very beginning of an encounter. In English-speaking countries, it is mostly used just as a greeting and no serious answer is expected to it. On the contrary, the Finnish counterpart (Mita kuuluu?) can expect a 'real' answer after it: quite often the person responding to the question starts to tell how his or her life really is at the moment, what's new, how they have been doing.'"
Yes! And engaging in useless courtship rituals and foreplay, why not just walk up to a woman, rip down her dress and ram it in her? It would be so much more efficient and take much less time out of both of your days.
Being Dutch I hate this fake "how are you" crap (you don't care and you don't need to know that anyway), my friends/colleages mostly feel the same. I understand there is a few seconds of "handshake" in communication, eg you answer the phone with some filler before saying your name (good $daypart, your speaking with $name), but don't ask questions without expecting an answer.
In English-speaking countries, it is mostly used just as a greeting and no serious answer is expected to it.
Though that may be true today, I believe in the past, it was simply a way to elicit from people whether or not they were sick...so you'd know to stay away from them.
There's a reason "we" have Welcome mats. It meant, only come in if you're well (not sick.)
There's a reason we say and do the things we do...generally we have to look to the past to understand them, as their reason for being useful then, may not serve a function today.
Give a hand, not a hand-out.
The normal answer would then be "could be better". If the other person's interested they'll follow up or they might reply "sorry to hear that" and politely move on. Really, how hard is that?
Small talk performs a function, one that is not needed in every context.
Americans are the most notoriously friendly people on Earth. "Notorious", because most people from other countries find Americans' tendency to strike up conversations with strangers off-putting.
I think this is a legacy of immigration. I think it grew out of interactions between people penned in close quarters with others they didn't understand very well, who had different cultures, religions and languages. I believe those people developed a norm of effusively over-the-top superficial friendliness to compensate for the fact that subtleties were lost on each other, subtleties which told you whether someone was safe or not.
When a stranger asks "How are you?" he's not asking for personal information; he's just signalling that he's friendly and therefore safe. You signal back with an equally conventional "Fine, and how are you?" regardless of what your actual condition is. That's all small talk is, it's establishing a safe space between strangers.
Now America isn't culturally uniform; if you go to places that don't trace their culture back to the late 19th C earth 20th C immigration boom, the norm for approachability varies dramatically. In the rural South it's even more over-the-top than average, but in rural New England and out West people can appear suspicious or hostile to strangers. Again, it's superficial; if you're actually in need people there will give you the shirt of their backs; they're just not broadcasting "I'm not threatening" all the time.
People don't do that consciously, it's what we're trained to do because it worked for our grandparents and great-grandparents.
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The AC above was pretty rude in his language, but I was thinking the same. As someone on the autism spectrum who has 2 kids on the spectrum, that sounds like how I and my son would communicate with strangers if we had a choice. I've learned to fit in through trial and error (much more on the error) and my Son is learning how to do so through special ed. However, people on the spectrum are often very literal and I do find insincerity very confusing. I have to stop myself from answering small talk honestly (like when someone asks "how was your weekend?" I start mentally evaluating how satisfactory it was and have to stop myself, forgetting that the random person trapped in the elevator with me just wants a quick and pleasant pre-canned response). I can definitely relate to how the article describes Finish communication style.
Yup, the only relative languages being spoken really are Estonian and Hungarian, and only Estonian is close enough that it's (relatively) easy to learn for us Finns. I've spent some time in Estonia, and although I still can't really speak it well, I can understand basic sentences if they slow down the rate of speech a bit.
Some history about the language and its importance to the whole nation for those who may be interested:
The language is also what's kept the culture different from the other nordic countries and enabled the rise of Finnish nationalism. We're a part of Sweden for a long time and you really had to be able to speak Swedish during that time to be anything other than common folk. So Swedish was the language of the ruling class and the state for the longest time. Finnish didn't even have a system of grammar and hence could not be written at all prior to 1500s. Curiously enough, we've largely the Russians to thank for changing that: after we moved to be a part of the Russian empire in 1809 the Russians realized that actions had to be taken so as to try and solidify the status of Finland as part of the empire and lower sympathies towards Sweden that were still really strong. So they did a lot of things, including letting us have a high amount of political autonomy (we had our own parliament making laws long before we became independent), moving the capital from the western coast to Helsinki to move it away from Stockholm and closer to st. Petersburg, we even had our own money and a customs border with Russia. Finnish was used alongside Russian, even in matters of state, and schools operated in Finnish. and we had our army separate from the Russian army that operated in Finnish. They allowed the rise of Finnish nationalism because they wanted us to not pine after the days of Swedish rule. And for a long while this worked well. This started to change when the very pro-Finnish emperor Alexander the 2nd was murdered, and the ideology of panslavism started to gain a foothold. Starting from the end of the 1800s they started to roll back of the privileges and try make us more Russian, and again the language played a critical part: they tried phasing out Finnish as the official language of governance and make us into Russian speakers. This was met with widespread resistance, culminating to the assassination of the general-governor of Finland (the highest Russian official in the land) Nikolai Bobrikov in 1904, when he was shot on the stairs of the Senate by a Finnish nationalist. The seed of distrust against the Russian rule had been planted.
When the revolution hit Russia, we saw out chance and declared independence, figuring the Lenin would not risk having a war in Finland with everything else going on. Lenin looked at what's going on in Finland, saw the high amount of tension between the working class and the better educated and figured we're about to enter a civil war soon anyway, so he actually let us go. And he was correct, in 1918 the rift between the Reds and the Whites exploded and we had our civil war within a year of becoming independent. Where he was wrong though was the winning side. Lenin figured the communists would win and Finland would seek to re-join the then still-forming soviet Union, but they did not win, and we remained independent.
There's a famous phrase from the time of Russian rule, supposedly coined by the Finnish (writer, journalist and a politician, Adolf Ivar Arwidsson: 'We are not Swedes, and we do not want to become Russians. Let us then be Finns.' The Russians and later on the Soviets had some trouble accepting this and tried to change it later on during the second world war but as the time of the Russian rule was still very much in the national memory at that time we said no and fought back.
Though we're on the losing side (we eventually had to align ourselves with the Nazis in the beginning of the
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