Language skills
are often trumpeted as a cornerstone of social integration, allowing citizens
to participate fully in their host communities. British prime minister David
Cameron recently announced a £20 million fund ($29 million) for English
language lessons to tackle radicalization in the UK, for example. Similarly, US
presidential hopeful Donald Trump has called for assimilation and
English-speaking in the US.
But with
transnational mobility and trade as defining features of our times, have we
considered Cameron’s or Trump’s own supporters and their ability to speak
English within a wider international community?
Native English
speakers are infamously unable to speak languages other than their own. As well
as being a professional handicap, this has been shown to hinder exporters and
hurt trade.
And now
ironically, there is mounting evidence that in international business, native
English speakers are failing to integrate as a result of their shortcomings in
tailoring their English for this context. When it comes to English—the
international language not only for business but also higher education and
cross-border collaboration—research shows that, far from being able to rest on
their laurels, native speakers are not masters of the world’s global language.
Baffling
predicament
Speakers who
have English as their mother tongue can find themselves in a baffling
predicament. While at home they are persuaded that the rest of the world now
speaks their lingo. Abroad they discover that their own English renders them
incomprehensible to colleagues and business partners. In one piece of research
into English as the world’s corporate language, a British expat in Scandinavia
recounted: “When I started [in Denmark] I spoke I guess as I normally had done
and wrote as I normally had done and people weren’t getting me, they weren’t
understanding.”
Indeed, while
her Danish colleagues were increasingly used to working in English with others
from the wider international community, it was the native varieties that caused
problems. Used to working with English speakers from all over Europe, a Spanish
student in Denmark remarked to another researcher: “Now it’s more difficult for
me to understand the real English.”
What is more,
this “real English”—which dizzyingly encompasses the whole range of dialects
from Liverpool in England, to Wellington in New Zealand, via Johannesburg in
South Africa, and Memphis in the US—is only the start of the problem.
Communication
breakdowns
When an American
manager in Japan cannot understand why his Japanese staff will not give him the
“ballpark figure” he has demanded, this breakdown in communication can lead to
a real disintegration in workplace relations. And the underlying feelings of
mistrust are mutual. The inability of the traveling native English speaker to
refrain from homeland idiosyncrasies, subtextual dexterity, and cultural
in-jokes has been found to result in resentment and suspicion.
International
colleagues resent the lack of effort made on the part of the monoglot English
speaker. They experience a loss of professional stature when having to speak
with those who are not only comfortable with the language, but who appear to
vaunt the effortlessness with which they bend the language to their will. And
they suspect that the offending expat uses this virtuosity to gain unfair
advantage in the workplace.
On a recent trip
to Japan, a manager in an international consortium recounted to me how he and
other international partners would hold back from actively contributing to
meetings where his British and American partners dominated the floor. Following
the meeting they would seek one another out to discuss matters between
themselves in private.
This points to a
very real danger that native English speakers, especially those who never
mastered another language, risk missing out on business opportunities—whether
in the form of contracts, idea development, job opportunities, and the like—due
to a basic lack of understanding of what international English communication
entails.
The travel
writer Pico Iyer once described a social visit of a British friend to his
partner in Kyoto. He remarked: “The three of us embarked on an utterly
unnecessary conversation in which I deftly translated from English into English
and then back again.”
When it is much
easier to work with others who are on the same page as you, the intransigent
native English speaker may actually be given a wide berth by their counterparts
abroad.
This should be a
wake-up call for politicians like Cameron and Trump. Rather than laying the
problems of English at the door of those who speak it as a second, third, or
fourth language, it would be wise for mother-tongue nations to do more to
prepare their professional classes for the language challenges they face
abroad.
We might take
heed of Robert Burns, if you can understand him, when he wrote: “O wad some
Pow’r the giftie gie us to see oursels as ithers see us!”
Reflecting on
the difficulties others may have in understanding our English may well be a
good start to becoming a better member of the international community. And a
more attractive business partner too.
This post originally appeared at The
Conversation.
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