Questions to Ask Someone from a Different Culture
Questions for a friend, colleague, partner, or in-law whose cultural background differs from yours. They cover food, family, language, religious practice, and what it is like to hold two cultures at once.
The questions
Open any question for the note
How would you describe your background, in your own words?
Why ask it
Lets them set the terms: nationality, region, religion, language, or a hyphenated identity. Guessing the label first is the most common way this conversation starts badly.
What did dinner look like in your house growing up?
Why ask it
A safe and vivid opener that gets at family structure, timing, and who cooked, all without asking anyone to explain their culture in the abstract.
Which language do you think in, and does that change depending on what you're thinking about?
Why ask it
Bilingual people often count, swear, or do arithmetic in one language and argue in another. The pattern is usually something they have noticed and rarely been asked about.
What's the first thing you'd want me to know if I came to your family's house?
Why ask it
Practical and flattering, and it produces the concrete rules that matter: shoes, gifts, refusing food twice, greeting the oldest person first.
Which traditions did you keep, and which ones did you let go?
Why ask it
The dropped ones are the more interesting half. People usually have clear reasons, and the answer separates their actual practice from what outsiders assume they do.
What's a holiday or occasion that matters to you that people here mostly don't know about?
Why ask it
Also tells you whether they get the day off, which is a real friction in workplaces and schools. Ask when it falls this year and note it down.
How is disagreement handled in your family?
Why ask it
Directness, deference to elders, and whether conflict is aired or absorbed vary enormously. This one explains more about a cross-cultural relationship than any list of customs.
What's expected of you as a son or daughter that surprises people here?
Why ask it
Obligations around money, housing, career choice, and care of parents are often invisible to outsiders and non-negotiable to them.
What role does religion play in your day, if any?
Why ask it
"If any" matters: plenty of people are assumed devout because of their background. Answers range from five daily prayers to nothing but a family funeral, and both are useful to know.
How do people show affection or respect in your culture, compared with here?
Why ask it
Covers touch, formality, titles, and how much emotion is shown in public. Mismatches here get misread as coldness or as being overfamiliar.
Is there something you do automatically that people here find odd?
Why ask it
Gets at habits rather than beliefs, which is where daily life actually happens. Answers are usually small: how they eat, greet, apologise, or handle money.
What's the hardest thing to explain to someone who didn't grow up with it?
Why ask it
Invites them to name the gap rather than perform their culture. Expect concepts around family duty, honour, shame, or hospitality that English handles poorly.
Do you feel like you switch between two versions of yourself?
Why ask it
Common for people raised between cultures and rarely asked directly. Some find it exhausting, some find it useful, and a few reject the framing, which is itself an answer.
What did your parents want for you that you saw differently?
Why ask it
Generational difference within a culture is usually sharper than difference between cultures. It also stops the conversation treating their background as one fixed thing.
What's a stereotype about your background you're tired of?
Why ask it
Gives them a clean way to say it. Notice whether the tiring part is hostility or well-meant praise, since the second is more common and harder to raise.
Has anyone here ever got it right in a way that stuck with you?
Why ask it
A more useful question than asking about slights, and it tells you concretely what respect looked like: a name pronounced properly, food remembered, a holiday acknowledged.
What do you want to pass on to your children, if you have or want them?
Why ask it
Language usually comes first and is the hardest to keep. The answer separates what someone values from what they merely inherited.
Is there something about your culture you'd change?
Why ask it
Asking this shows you are not treating their background as untouchable. Many people are more critical of their own culture than any outsider would risk being.
What should I ask about if I want to understand rather than just be polite?
Why ask it
Hands the direction over. The answer tells you which topics they consider central, which are usually not the ones outsiders pick.
If I want to learn more, where should I start: a book, a film, a person, a place to eat?
Why ask it
Ends with something you can act on, and it moves the burden of educating you off them. Following up later is what makes the whole conversation credible.
How to use these questions
Practical guidance for the conversation itself
Before you start
Learn what you can on your own first
Basic facts, the name of the language, roughly where the country or region is, are your job to look up. Spending their time on them signals the opposite of interest.
Ask about their life, not their people
"How does your family do it" gets a real answer. "How do your people do it" makes one person answer for millions and produces careful, flattened replies.
Get the name right
Ask how it is said, repeat it back, and use it. Shortening someone's name for your own convenience undoes a lot of goodwill.
Answer the same questions yourself
Describe your own family's food, arguments, and holidays. Most people have never been asked to see their own upbringing as cultural, and doing so evens out the exchange.
Common mistakes
Praise that flattens
"Your culture is so respectful of elders" sounds warm and leaves no room to disagree. Ask what it is actually like instead of telling them what it is like.
Timing it badly
A first meeting, a work lunch with an audience, or a moment when they are the only person from their background in the room are all poor settings for these questions.
Treating culture as the explanation for everything
Sometimes they are quiet because they are tired. Attributing every trait to their background is its own kind of not-seeing-them.
Asking and not listening
If you already have a view of their culture, you will hear confirmation. The point of asking is to be told something you had wrong.
Requiring them to teach you
Some people enjoy explaining their background and some are worn out by it. A short answer or a change of subject is a decline, and it should be accepted the first time.