Straussian Communication in Oral Only Cultures
Imagine person A and B from Village A communicating to each other in an oral language with no written record. Say Village B was conquered 4 generations ago by Village A but little interaction save pillaging and rape went between the two.
The first generation from Village A that conquered Village B transmitted their language after killing all of their men over the age of 12. Keep in mind there is no written record so linguistic drift from a combination of troublemakers, small population, and naughty slang has let Village B's syntax diverge significantly from Village A but intervillage communication can still happen with pointing and emotions.
2 upstarts from Village B travel to trade with 2 individuals from Village A when the Bs realize that the As did not know the relative value of their goods. Village B can trade 2 spears for one bottle of cashew liquor with Village C but Village A will give one bottle of cashew liquor for 1 spear. Realizing this, one Village B individual uses local slang and language divergence to sound perfectly normal and slightly unintelligible to the Village A traders but he communicates a sense of excitedness and Something Odd to his compatriot from Village B. The compatriot picks up on the reading here and communicating again in perfect Village B speak (from the viewpoint of the Village A people) proceeds to finish the trade and gain alpha.
The Village A embassy was hoodwinked and wasn't able to understand because of the divergent context pools for their languages. The context of growing up in Village B assigned different meaning to different tones, etc. When communicating in homogenous monoculture english it's harder to do this but imagine a conversation pulling through 3 levels of abstraction going from first an idea of a person you might both know and then jumping to why they would act a certain way in a situation (simulating a mental model of a third person) and then another person's reaction to that person (simulating a simulation of a reaction to a simulated reaction) within the same sustained conversation within a few seconds. This feels like it requires considerable thinking power on top of shared similar views of people so that chosen language will bring the right ideas into the other person's mental model.