Difference Between Foreign and International

Foreign vs International

When we talk of a country other than ours, we always tend to include the word foreign in our discussion. Someone who has been abroad, even for a short visit, is referred to as a foreign return person. This means that foreign means any country other than one’s own and people belonging to another country are also called foreigners in the same way. However, there is another term international which some people erroneously use as a synonym for foreign. This is incorrect as international is a term that applies when we are talking about more than one country. There are other differences associated between foreign and international that will be discussed in this article.

The situation becomes confusing when terms like foreign policy are used commonly though what it conveys is international policy of a country. However, in a sense the term is correct as a nation has a policy to deal with other countries of the world that is uniform and hence the name foreign is pertinent. In sports, international is the term that is used to describe a game between two national teams and we do not say that our team is playing against a foreign team. Instead, the game is described as an international game. The same goes for music that is referred to as international music in place of foreign music. The only constraint in this case being involvement of more than a single country means you can call any music that is heard in more than a country as international music.

English is referred to as an international language as it is spoken in many countries of the world. However, foreign is the word that is always used with liquor or alcoholic drinks. We do not call champagne coming from France as international but as foreign liquor. But currency is one concept that is always found associated with the term foreign though there are many who feel that US dollar is today an international currency. This is why there are foreign exchanges and foreign currency traders.