Interkulturalität – immer noch eine Herausforderung für Linguistik und Deutsch als Fremdsprache

The paper discusses the perspectives of intercultural linguistics as a new paradigm of German philology. Concepts of cultural standards are critizised and deficits of cultural contrastive analysis are demonstrated as shown by the example of code mixing. It is argued that interculturality is more than cultural contrastivity and more than transculturality and furthermore that for intercultural research the analysis of language is of utmost importance. Finally the paper demonstrates that in the central subject of intercultural communication it is worth while not only looking at misunderstandings but also at the different modes of linguistic politeness.