When people coming from different languages and cultures interact, instances of dissonance may occur. Among these, verbal rudeness represents a phenomenon that never goes unnoticed and that usually invites negative judgments by native speakers who belong to the speech community in which the linguistic action takes place. In this paper, I explore some factors underlying unintentional verbal rudeness, which may occur when people communicate at an inter-cultural level. The purpose of this study is to point out that the phenomenon is worth exploring, in view of the fact that the analysis of the verbal behavior of non-native speakers may help us to identify the matrixes of several kinds of ethnic stereotypes. For the present exploratory study I carried out an analysis of three speech acts (direct requests, apologies and thanks) across Italian, Japanese and English, based on data collected through an ethnographic approach. Additionally, the study is aimed at putting forward a vision of cross-cultural pragmatics founded on theoretical grounds free of cultural bias.