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Communication, the sending and receiving of messages, is an integral part of culture. Because culture is such an important ingredient in all behavior, and so much of behavior is spent in one type of communication or another, it is hard to tell the difference between the two. In any event, whether or not they are one and the same, culture and communication certainly go hand in hand.
In the cross-cultural context, communication, like everything else, is more complicated. It's almost impossible to send a message that does not have at least some cultural content, whether it's in the words themselves, in the way they are said, or in the nonverbal signals that accompany them. And even if it were possible to send a message without any cultural content, it's not possible to receive one without passing it through the filter of one's own cultural conditioning. All of this means people from cultures different from your own may not interpret everything you say the way you meant it. And vice versa.
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