What are the Barriers of Communication?

Communication is the key to everything. Whether you want to express yourself, define something or share ideas, you need to have effective communication skills. It is an important aspect of personality development. However, if you have difficulty in communicating, you can face many problems from low self confidence to inability to express yourself.

In this article, we will be discussing what are the barriers of communication and ways to deal with these barriers.

Table of Contents

• What are the barriers of communication?
  • Lack of linguistic abilities/Semantic Barriers
  • Processing Time
  • Lack of clarity in ideas
  • Different Dialects
  • Physiological barriers
  • Psychological Barriers
  • Organizational Barrier
  • Cultural Barrier
• Disadvantages of communication barriers
• Advantages of good communication skills
• How to deal with the barriers of communication?

What are the Barriers to Communication?

The barriers to communication can be either physiological, geographical or psychological. 

1. Lack of linguistic abilities/Semantic Barriers

This can be considered one of the biggest barriers of communication. These are also known as semantic barrier. If you lack proper language knowledge, you will not be able to speak fluently. You will take time to find appropriate words and may have difficulty fitting these words into a sentence. Lacking command of language will not hinder your speaking skills but also cause trouble understanding the other person. This will delay the time you will take to understand and answer the question. Overall, the communication will have no fluency.

2. Processing Time

This often happens with second languages. Since you do not think in that language, it takes time to think thoughts in your mother tongue and then convert them into the language. This affects your ability to communicate smoothly. To understand this barrier, you need to understand that while you speak in your native language, you think and speak in the same language. This saves you processing time, which ultimately builds fluency while you speak.

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3. Lack of clarity in ideas

If you do not have clarity in ideas, there is a probability that you will not be able to vocalize them. Suppose you have to speak on a topic but you do not have solid ideas about it. This will, in turn, cause difficulties in building a flow and sentences. This will impact your fluency in communicating and ultimately hamper your dialogue. 

4. Different Dialects

People with different dialects also face this issue. A person belonging to Madhya Pradesh will have difficulty communicating with people from North-west Uttar Pradesh or from Hariyana. Similarly, a person from the U.S. will have trouble communicating with people from Britain since their English speaking accent is completely different from each other. Due to differences in the way of pronouncing words, there is confusion and thus, lack of fluency. It is, therefore, important to have a fundamental understanding of the pronunciation and dialect-specific words. 

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5. Physiological barriers

A person suffering from speech or hearing disorders will be unable to communicate properly with others. This is due to their inability to understand words or formulate words themselves. People with conditions like Autism, where they lack abilities to develop social skills, also suffer from the ability to communicate properly. 

6. Psychological Barriers

There may be many underlying reasons behind psychological barriers of communication. Lack of confidence, fear, inability to express emotions or trauma are are parts of one’s psychology that can cause difficulties in communicating with others. There is another cause behind them and psychological analysis is important to understand them. 

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7. Organizational Barrier

This is one of the professional barriers of communication that occur due to structure as well as rules and regulations within the organizations. This barrier of communication occurs when free flow communication is not possible within the organization. Complexity of organizational structure and multiple managers within the hierarchy may lead to this disruption in the effective communication.

8. Cultural Barrier

When people belonging to different cultures communicate with each other, there is a high chance of difficulties in proper communication. The reason is simple, certain words, terms and phrases may mean different in two cultures. A word may even have an inappropriate meaning in other cultures.

Disadvantages of Barriers of Communication 

While we have already discussed the types of barriers, we must also know the associated disadvantages.

1. Lack of effective communication can cause you embarrassment, which can lower your self-confidence. For healthy personality development, it is important to deal with the issue.
2. Due to difficulties in communication, you are unable to express your ideas. It is important to be clear and fluent in communication.
3. Lacking good communication skills can be negative to your personality. It can overshadow the strong pursuits of your personality.

Advantages of Good Communication Skills

The following points are the advantages of effective communication skills:

• Those who have good communication skills often come up as individuals with high self-confidence.
• Effective communication is an add-on to your personality. Even if you lack in some other department, communication skills can overshadow your weaknesses. 
• Even in job interviews, a person having impactful communication skills will have an advantage over other candidates. 

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• In business, you can have an upper hand since you have impeccable negotiation skills due to your ability to communicate well.
• You can acquire more customers since you have the ability to convince people with powerful communication skills.
• With effective communication, you have better management skills as you can express your thoughts and lead the team more efficiently.

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How to deal with the barriers of communication?

We have already learned what are the barriers of communication in the first section. We will now focus on the ways to combat these issues. 

1. Think in the language that you want to speak. Once you start thinking in that language, the processing time will reduce and you will become significantly fluent in that language. 
2. Try to hold a conversation with yourself and record it. This will help you understand your areas of weakness. You will be able to pinpoint whether the problem lies in pronunciation, grammar, or sentence formation. Keep practicing it, and with time, you will significantly improve. 
3. Enrol in communication courses for overall improvement. There are many online courses that can help you in improving your communication skills.
4. One of the very effective methods is to communicate with strangers. Not only does this gives confidence but also improves your fluency on the language. 
5. Watch videos of the language in which you want to communicate. This will help you acquire their accent and the commonly used words in your vocabulary.
6. Read books that will help improve your vocabulary. You can also practice through books that have dialogues in the language that you want to communicate in.
7. If you still want more guidance, you can learn communication with the help of a tutor. The mentor will give you one-on-one guidance and it will significantly improve your weak areas.

Conclusion

Hope that this article has been helpful in understanding the barriers of communication. Once you have identified your weaknesses, rather than getting disappointed, try to work on them. For fluent communication, it is important to keep on practicing with people. Even if you start slow, consistency and practice will help in the significant improvement of your communication skills.