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In the broad sense, the language in which the foreigner is addressed or in which he is heard, if he is, is the ensemble of culture, it is the values, the norms, the meanings that inhabit the language. Speaking the same language is not only a linguistic operation. It's a matter of ethos generally.
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In 1997, Anne Dufourmantelle and Jacques Derrida entered into an exchange about the philosophy of hospitality. Published as On Hospitality: Anne Dufourmantelle Invites Jacques Derrida to Respond, their two reflections are printed side by side -- hers on one page, his on the other.
It's hard to know how to read them. But it's also clear that this is a kind of forking of ideas, if not of the actual words. Each writer develops her/his own account of things, sometimes noticing the other, mostly not.
Along the way, both writers refer to the changes to everyday communication that were becoming important in the mid 1990s, surfacing these through ideas about "technology", "the internet", email (CompuServe!), and electronic surveillance.
Derrida's ideas have been taken up by philosophers of education and open up a useful way of thinking about learning as hospitable: a practice of anticipating, preparing, giving place to the other.
For Derrida, the paradox of hospitality is that in order to be meaningful, it has to be limited: a gift that could be withheld, because the host is the one who controls and limits access to the home.
Derrida differentiates here between hospitality governed through a framework of limitable rights, and the impossible hospitality of justice that he calls "hyperbolic": the hospitality that exists without constraint, that therefore isn't capable of being hospitality at all.
Derrida follows Levinas in seeing the question and nature of language as inseparable from hospitality. This seems important to the way in which learning is experienced as a practice of hospitality among strangers whose languages are so different even when they are the same, always speaking to different experiences.
This is something to bear in mind when trying to explain SFW; and especially when writing instructions for it. What do strangers (to coding, to internet history) need to know to understand the language of Federated Wiki? What kind of hospitality is framed by this language?
Other writers have noticed that host and guest come from the same source (as do hostage, hostile and hospital--and medical writers in particular have looked at the question of medical hospitality in this light).
The status of host and guest is achieved and maintained through the use of language: someone offers the terms of welcome, someone else accepts these terms, or doesn't. But language is slippery.
Welcome Visitors: who is the guest? who is the host?
Related Who's We White Man?