NON-NATIVE English speakers and companies should not be language-submissive. Linguistic diversity is worth fighting for.

English as a common business language is an easy choice, and much like most doctrines celebrating homogeneity, the one-company/one-people/one-language-fits-all cultural mentality is deceptively easy. Economical reasoning predicts that this will happen increasingly in multinational companies.

While a common language facilitates socialization processes, communication and team building, social identity theory speaks to how language barriers set boundaries with many unwanted consequences. Moreover, the alternatives to one common language are costly and cumbersome.

So, this is a no-brainer, right? Not quite. Before making sweeping conclusions about English as a lingua franca, or any lingua franca, we need to consider some inevitable downsides.

1. English is already becoming a de facto lingua of business. This "choice" is historically determined by the recent centuries' colonial, economical and technological power of English-speaking countries.

English as the dominant language in IT and the Internet is reinforcing this, and English is massively spread via film, television and music.

As a consequence, languages are disappearing faster than ever before, which makes language preservation important around the globe as a part of maintaining cultural diversity.

2. A common language gives people the illusion of communicating effectively and sharing the same context and interpretation, even when this may not be the case.

The same words can be used to mean different things in different local settings, and different pronunciations or strong accents can make the experience less than common. Thus, it isn't really a common language and some people are more common than others.

3. The national, regional or ethnic identity which is supported by non-dominating languages, is suppressed by standardization. Napoleon did it. Franco did it. And the EU may soon do it.

Today, people who speak English as a mother tongue are automatically in a position of power and this can create a language-based status hierarchy, with non-native English speakers feeling excluded and devalued. We have plenty of examples in companies where ideas and content are disregarded or ridiculed when not phrased in Ivy-League English.

4. Languages are cues that activate different and important culture-specific frames. This means that different thinking styles that relate to languages will not be able to surface in a "one-fits-all culture" and organizations will be less able to benefit from a potentially broader base of ideas and perspectives.

In conclusion, the assumed efficiency gains from relying on any common language in multinational companies come at a price. It may make us richer in the short term, but it makes us poorer in the long run. This is why we need to preserve and cherish language diversity and say NO to always using the same "common" language.

(Karsten Jonsen is a research fellow at IMD specializing in organizational behavior.)


Maury Peiperl

INTERNATIONAL companies and international commerce generally imply a fundamental need for people to communicate across the globe, at least at a basic verbal and written level.

Translation and multi-lingual communication are important, but unless there is one common language that everyone doing global business can speak, the complexity these imply (which increases as the square of the number of languages used) makes it unwieldy for cross-border businesses to function.

Multi-lingual firms will always find it difficult to compete with those who use a single cross-border language, as will those who use something other than the de facto global language, for both will pay higher transaction costs.

We can argue about the merits of the situation, but English already is the language of international commerce, and this is not likely to change any time soon.

This situation may not be optimal, especially if English is not your strongest language (and I admit here to being astonishingly lucky in my choice of birthplace), but it makes sense.

It was an accident of timing, of course, that English happened to be the language of the dominant economic world power at the moment when globalization reached the inflection point on its S-curve.

But it's done, and it's working. Even if there is a better solution (and Esperanto didn't get very far), practically speaking it could never be put in place at this stage, short of a world war or a new dominant power - and for its part, China shows far more interest in teaching hundreds of millions of people to speak English than in advancing Chinese as a global language.

I am no fan of international business English. It may be dominant in North America, but it is hardly a language reflective of Europe, let alone Asia.

It doesn't really represent a bridging of cultures (unless you go back to the Saxons and the Gauls).

Still, it is relatively simple, having few cases and a pronunciation scheme that pretty much follows the letters as you read them.

This makes it appropriate, if not ideal, for what it has become.

And though it may be as painful at times to native speakers as it is challenging to non-speakers, the simple international version of English (usually) works: No apostrophes; limited punctuation. Interchangeable homophone spellings. Extremely limited vocabulary, often misused. Little color, little feeling. But serviceable, and essential.

It's a kind of Lowest Common Denominator, by necessity, but the English of international business is another step forward in a global cultural evolution that has been picking up pace along with cross-border flows of goods, money, and information over the last few decades.

For nearly all global enterprises, wherever they are based - and even tourists, wherever they go - English is the language of international contact.

It may be a crude way of bringing the business world together, but it's a start.


(Maury Peiperl is Professor of Leadership and Strategic Change at IMD.)