Rudeness, whether real or perceived, can deeply affect cooperation, trust, and workplace culture. But judgements of what we consider rude aren’t confined to specific disrespectful words or phrases – they are shaped by the listener’s emotional processing, attention to non-verbal cues, and underlying moral stance.

In multilingual settings this complexity is compounded, as misunderstandings don’t just arise from vocabulary gaps or grammar mistakes. In fact, they often have more to do with ourselves – our own emotional and moral judgements of what others say and do – than the words being uttered.

If you frequently communicate in your second language, you’ll have encountered this regularly. Someone might speak to you calmly, clearly and without a hint of ill will, but still leave you with an uneasy thought: “they didn’t say anything wrong… but it felt rude”.

Our research sheds light on this phenomenon by looking at the intersection of pragmatics (how language is used in context), emotion research, bilingualism, and moral psychology.

Our recent study, published in Lingua, examined how people using their first and second languages rate impoliteness in workplace interactions. Our findings reveal that judgements of rudeness are not purely linguistic, or even solely cultural; they are deeply tied to emotions and moral intuitions.

Rating rudeness in the workplace

We recruited 55 first language (L1) English speakers and 45 Spanish speakers whose second language (L2) was English. Participants watched a series of video clips depicting workplace interactions involving requests, interruptions, disagreements, and directives. After viewing each clip, they were asked to:

Rate how impolite the interaction seemed

Rate how impolite the interaction seemed

Report the emotions they........

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