The interactional accomplishment of discrimination in South Africa. In Donal Carbaugh, ed. Cultural Communication and Intercultural Contact . Lawrence Erlbaum, p. 243. This is not uncommon.
People have different ways of communicating with others that are influenced by where they are from.
Yet, the person who asked the question might think that the response was one way of dodging the question. There are many communication barriers that exist among various races and groups of all sorts which includes ethnic, regional, and socio-economic. This is related to the way people treat those types of people. The chart above shows historical factors as being the primary cause for social inequality. Following the arrows, you can see how each part of the chart is related to one another.