Companies ditch local languages for English

[Lord Zentei]

While the English-descended population in the US drops proportionally to the overall population, the cultural strength of the English language in the international arena marches inexorably on, it seems:

(CNN) -- While English has long been the de facto language of international business, more multinational companies are now mandating that employees communicate only in English.

According to Tsedal Neeley, a professor at Harvard Business School, companies that don't adopt English as a standard for their entire organization will, at some point, "experience some form of bottleneck."

"It depends on what the company does, but if you'll have members in different countries needing to collaborate -- whether it's to integrate technology platforms or cater to customers worldwide -- it will become more important that even middle managers and employees with international assignments will need a common language in order to interface with others."

Airbus, Daimler-Chrysler, Nokia, Renault, Samsung and Microsoft Beijing have all mandated English as their corporate language, writes Neeley in the May 2012 edition of Harvard Business Review -- and she says more than 70 Danish companies have now migrated to English.

In 2010, Japanese internet services company Rakuten made headlines when it announced it would become an English-only organization, with all communication, verbal and email, in English.

"English is the only global language," CEO Hiroshi Mikitani told CNN at the time. "We're doing a global business. I think this is the only way a Japanese service organization can become a global organization."

"If you want to become successful in other countries, you need to internationalize the headquarters," he added.

To help make the transition, Japanese language signage was removed from cafeterias and elevators. Mikitani even conducts performance reviews with his Japanese executives in English, according to Neeley.

If this sounds bewildering for employees, it can be. Two years into an English-only implementation at one company Neeley studied, 70% of employees reported feeling frustrated with the policy. That's why she says businesses must plan carefully before implementing an English-only policy.

"In the absence of language strategies, you see so many people getting hurt and diminished," Neeley says. "When a company announces a language change without any thought or preparation for employees, many people lose the promotional path that they've spent their whole lives developing."

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Shifting a company's entire operations into a new language isn't easy. But Neeley, who has studied corporate language strategy for a decade, has some suggestions.

• Companies need a clear, well-aligned strategy and "it needs to be supported and implemented at all levels of the organization, from the CEO down to the supervisor/manager of every employee who is subject to having to convert to a new language," she says.

• Off-the-rack tuition won't cut it. "English lessons alone are not enough," Neeley says. "If you have an aggressive environment where people work an extraordinary amount of hours and they're challenged with goals, language vendors need to help make sure you're capable of learning successfully while being successful at your job."

The best results come when instruction is customized to employees' roles, with vocabulary geared specifically towards the types of emails they write, for instance.

• Go for broke. While some companies choose to become bilingual before adopting English wholesale, Neeley says this is "incredibly expensive and unsustainable."

• Those with English as a first language need to make adjustments too. "Native speakers need to learn how to dial themselves down and how to accommodate others," Neeley says.

• Managers should adopt a zero-tolerance policy to backsliding, to make it clear that the change to English is not only possible but permanent.

Depending on the company's size, resources and the aggressiveness of its pursuit of English, Neeley estimates implementation is "a four to 10-year odyssey", with ongoing maintenance required thereafter. But she says the journey is worth it, pointing out that a company with English proficiency across the board has greater operational agility and "can serve all of their market seamlessly by using all of their human capital worldwide to achieve any end."

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Immediately after acquiring a Canadian company, Rakuten was able to deploy seven of its top engineers to Toronto, to begin integration processes, according to Neeley.

"Two years ago they could have never done that," she says. "That shows the extent to which expertise and knowledge flows through the company in ways it wouldn't otherwise."

For individuals too, there are benefits. Depending on their fluency and how far their career has advanced, an employee may experience performance anxiety and job insecurity when asked to work in a new language. But, Neeley says, as fluency increases, the emotional strain diminishes and bilingualism becomes something enjoyable. Perhaps even profitable.

"You also see them starting to shoot up in their careers," Neeley observes. "They begin to take on roles that require more and more communication in the English language."

[K. A. Pital]

The spread of the language is directly proportional to the sheer scope of a certain hegemony. Had it been the French Empire and not the British one, which laid the foundation of the modern US-Europe hegemony, we'd be talking about how French is rising despite the continued decline of France.

[Surlethe]

The spread of the language is directly proportional to the sheer scope of a certain hegemony. Had it been the French Empire and not the British one, which laid the foundation of the modern US-Europe hegemony, we'd be talking about how French is rising despite the continued decline of France.

My feeling is that the dominance of English is a result of British dominance of the non-European world in the nineteenth century followed by fifty years of American global hegemony reinforcing English during the reglobalization of the last thirty years. If the French had dominated the nineteenth century, the Americans would probably still have dominated the twentieth, and perhaps neither language would have been so dominant.

[Darmalus]

English has reached a certain critical mass and taken on a life of it's own, independent of any single nation. Depending on how you view the idea of a universal world language, this can be a good or bad thing.

Thanks for this, my linguistics professor is always looking for good discussion articles for the introductory classes.

[Lord Zentei]

Historically, it's no less due to the British Empire than the current American hegemony. They set the stage, so to speak.

Also, it's not just the power of America industrially, it's also the strength of its popular culture. Hollywood appeals to the masses abroad; French culture not so much. From Humphrey Bogart and John Wayne to Harrison Ford and Arnold Schwarzenegger to Leonardo DiCaprio and Johnny Depp, movie stars spoke and speak English; and Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson and Eminem sang and sing in English (likewise: Queen, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, etc. - so jolly old England did its fair share in these matters). As long as people have subtitled films to look at and English-language songs to listen to, they get impromptu English lessons, and why bother learning yet another foreign language? Also, why should English speakers bother learning when they don't import foreign language culture from others (and moreover, when others can simply speak English)?

The other important development was that the Internet started in America, and thus it speaks English. As an aside, since the early work on internet development was in no small part undertaken by the US armed forces, one can say that the military industrial complex managed to "conquer the world" in a manner of speaking after all.

EDIT: as for the above point - yes, I'm aware of the sheer number of non-English pages on the internet. But these are not used by "foreign users", as a rule.

[cosmicalstorm]

I would not mind a world where almost everyone spoke the same language. With the rise of automated translation, it seems to be getting closer.

[Broomstick]

The thing is, though, I don't think there will be just one global English - I anticipate that it will fracture into dialects that may or may not continue to be mutually intelligible over time. Which dialect is dominant will change over time, just as British English used to be the international standard for English and now arguably American English is that. If/when US prominence fades some other English dialect will take its place as the prestige dialect.

If there's some sort of global crash of sufficient strength it will fracture into separate languages just as Latin did after the Roman Empire fell.

I have mixed feelings about this. While I agree that on the one hand having one international language does facilitate something things and can be much more efficient I think that culturally we do lose something when we lose a language.

Or maybe I'm just old-fashioned in thinking there's more to life than just money.

[Ariphaos]

Has anyone else met anyone who was actively hostile to their own native tongue?

So far, I've met three Dutch, one Dane, and one Japanese person who seem to be of the opinion that their home language ought to be dragged behind the barn and shot.

[Guardsman Bass]

I've never met anyone like that, although I've met many ESL people who knowing English is really important.

[CJvR]

Sweden didn't fall into the Anglican lingo sphere until after the war, before that German was dominant.

That is why you can read of "kind trains" (ge:Schnell - fast; se:Snäll - kind) and "difficult artillery" (ge:Schwer - heavy; se:Svår - difficult) in older books.

[K. A. Pital]

Global English will inevitably fracture. Just look at Singlish.

[Lord Zentei]

English will fracture, but not to the point where people can't communicate. There will be lots of local dialects, but there will also be both (a) some sort of hodgepodge global version of English created by emergent consensus, and (b) some kind of "official" global English, possibly either US English, or some sort of yet-to-emerge "international English". Written English will also be less fractured than spoken English (thus serving the same role as written Mandarin in China).

[Surlethe]

Global English will inevitably fracture. Just look at Singlish.

It's already sometimes difficult for me, from the Midwest, to communicate with someone from Boston, let alone England or India. Global English is in the process of fracturing into local languages. Although often, as Zentei points out, a hodgepodge global language exists. In fact, a linguist friend of mine has been studying village languages in New Guinea; she says that sometimes people will have their own village language and a language they use to communicate with people from other villages, and they won't realize the two are different languages. Something similar may happen to English.

[Mr Bean]

Your forgetting the "why" of how languages fracture and that's because lack of communication allows deviations to become entrenched as laws. If the world is watching mass media and the mass media is American then how they talk on CNN is literally how people will naturally think to talk. All that is required for relative retention is simple common sourcing (IE do all the text books teach the same way) and population migration (Are people stationary enough that enclaves are created where you can be born, live and die without traveling more than thirty miles for years at a time).

As someone who has lived for over a year in over fourteen American states I can tell you on a purely anecdotal biases that those with the thickest accents travel the least. The thickest Southern accent I met lived on a farm his entire sixty year life which his great grandfather had built and to vacation he went two towns over and was quite proud of the fact he had once been in Raleigh for a whole day. He was a great old man but he was a walking talking southern stereotype.

[Brother-Captain Gaius]

I think you guys are severely underestimating the future impact of the Internet.

It's linguistically unprecedented - even the proliferation of TV and radio can't compare to worldwide instantaneous (mostly-)uncensored communication. I would argue that even this forum - where we have members from literally every corner of the world bringing different dialects of English to the table, but now brought in direct contact with one another - is chump change compared to what will come in the next ten or twenty years. Facebook and Youtube are just the tip of the iceberg, I think.

English isn't fracturing, it's unifying.

[Grandmaster Jogurt]

English isn't fracturing, it's unifying.

Do you have any actual evidence for this? Everyone I know who's studied linguistics has said that radio and television and the Internet aren't slowing down language evolution to any measurable degree.

[Omega18]

English isn't fracturing, it's unifying.

Do you have any actual evidence for this? Everyone I know who's studied linguistics has said that radio and television and the Internet aren't slowing down language evolution to any measurable degree.

The key point is why language may be continuing to evolve, due to the internet and other means of mass communications, typically people everywhere are getting exposed to these terms fairly quickly if they "go mainstream." For example, the words "sexting and "cyberbullying" were added to the twelfth edition of the Concise Oxford English Dictionary in 2011, even though the first time there is evidence of the word being used in case of sexting for instance was in 2005 (in the U.K. based Sunday Morning Telegraph for the record.)

The key point is in addition to people reading the term in newspapers who may reprint an AP article mentioning the subject or the like, words like this tend to quickly enter their way in media being produced. (Sometimes a widely seen T.V. show or the like can be responsible for creating the word or new meaning of a phrase in the first place.) For instance in January of this year, the Lifetime T.V. channel released a movie actually called "Sexting in Suburbia", and there are plenty of instances where the word has already been used either in a movie or especially a T.V. show for example. (Plenty of which receive effective international distribution.)

You might still have specialized words used by certain groups, but those they generally remain "trade terms" or the like rather than regional dialects if employed. (With them stopping being a trade term is they can used widely enough.) Basically its going to be difficult for the English language to become that different in various areas over the long term because if a particular term gets used commonly enough in a particular area, people elsewhere are going to pick up on it and at least be aware of what it means since inevitably people in that area are going to use it in postings on the internet or a similar situation where they are communicating with individuals elsewhere. (The option to google something also makes it generally possible to pick up at least a general idea of a word's meaning rather quickly if you're curious.)

[Broomstick]

Your forgetting the "why" of how languages fracture and that's because lack of communication allows deviations to become entrenched as laws. If the world is watching mass media and the mass media is American then how they talk on CNN is literally how people will naturally think to talk.

Except not all media is from Atlanta, Georgia (the headquarters of CNN).

British media, for example, has a market not just in Britain, and not just in the Commonwealth, but also in the US and has had it for years. If CNN impacts English then so does the BBC. The thing is, British and American English have diverged over the centuries. I know people in the US who want subtitles with their Doctor Who because they can't cope with the accents and/or idioms. The Harry Potter series had several American editions that were edited to be closer to American idiom because of concerns over young children in the US not understanding the books (trainers/sneakers, jumper/sweater, and for the title of the first book Philosopher's Stone vs. Sorcerer's Stone). There was also some debate over whether or not it was necessary to "translate" a children's book from one English dialect to another. And when the Teletubbies were brought to the US the voices were re-dubbed with American accents over concerns about the very young and understanding a different variant of English (which I confess I'm a little confused about myself, but whatever, I'm clearly not the market demographic on that).

And let's not touch on the spelling debate...

The thing is, American and British English are pretty close, certainly on a broad scale they're mutually intelligible dialects, yet there are notable vocabulary differences, idioms, phrasing, and clearly some concern about understanding across "the pond". They've also diverged despite centuries of cross-communication including compulsory study of English - that is, from England - literature in US schools and even more intensive cultural exchange throughout the 20th Century. I'm not sure any other English dialect is closer to American English than the British variety, yet these differences exist.

Even in the US, despite a society that is far more mobile than average, and has been for centuries, we've still developed regional differences and those differences are still in existence. There has been some "flattening" of dialects towards each other, picking up of vocabulary and idiom, but I don't see these going away entirely. At least not for generations.

If the internet/international media is going to generate anything it will be a reduced "global English" that people of most/all English dialects will have in common, but the accents and regional practices are going to continue. There is no reason not to. There will be more awareness of other dialects, but not obliteration of all but one.

[kc8tbe]

Has anyone else met anyone who was actively hostile to their own native tongue?

So far, I've met three Dutch, one Dane, and one Japanese person who seem to be of the opinion that their home language ought to be dragged behind the barn and shot.

I am a native English speaker, and I really hate English. The grammar is horribly inconsistent, the alphabet is not phonetic, and the use of articles is nigh impossible to explain. It is, in some ways, tragic that English (as opposed to some other language) is becoming the global standard.

That said, I think the emergence of a universally understood human language is a good thing -- provided we don't lose other languages in the process. If all companies were to go English only, what would be the point of a Frenchman speaking French? A Spaniard speaking Spanish? It would just be one more language to learn. If I had my dithers, everyone would be at least bilingual, Americans included.

[madd0ct0r]

There's british, american english, aussie drawl, oirish, ulster scots, creole, hinglish, chinglish, singlish that I've come across off the top of my head.
Oh, and International English - a stripped down, slightly simplified way of speaking. It's what i use on a daily basis because very few people out here* will understand a Lancastrian accent. 'Owt else we need doing?'

*here could be Hong Kong, Vietnam or London. International english needed for all three.

[Broomstick]

Actually, just saying "British English" is a bit nonsensical as there are multiple British dialects. What most Americans mean by "British English" is usually what I think is called Received Pronunciation (Thanks, BBC) with perhaps a passing notion of something called "Cockney" in London. In actual fact, I think Britain has more English dialects than any other region of comparable geographic size.

The US has several different dialects - what most foreigners call an "American" accent is actually the one from the mid-plains, the "Nebraska" variation which became popular in the US media because it was more intelligible to everyone else than most other US dialects and so preferred when communicating over broad regions. Except for when it's one of our major network anchors who is actually from Canada - which I find amusing, to think that people are watching/listening to some talking head thinking "gee, he sounds American" when actually he's from a bit further north. (Canadians have an advantage over Americans in audio media because Canadians don't mumble - well, OK, some probably do, but one of the ways you distinguish Canadian from American English is the lack of mumbling by Canadians. Thus, lots of Canadian news readers and actors working the US.)

I can only assume that every other major English-speaking region likewise has varying dialects - I know there's actually more than one Canadian accent though I can't always pick them out by ear. I'd be flabbergasted if the Australians don't have some regional variation just due to how spread out they are and the length of time they've been speaking the language there. I'm not so sure about someplace like India where English is more of a universal second language than the first language of a lot of people - being a second language might prevent some of the language excursions that lead to splitting, even as Indian English is a distinct dialect itself.

[Enigma]

Oh, you can definitely pick out different Canadian accents. Talk to a Newfoundlander then talk to an Anglophone in Quebec then Ontario then out west and say you can't pick out the difference. lol.

[Broomstick]

I can pick out the Newfoundlander and Quebecois, but I can't reliably distinguish Ontario from "out west". It might be obvious to you, but not to me.

[Grandmaster Jogurt]

[snip]

I understand the proposed mechanism and it certainly makes sense. But it's one thing to say that something might be happening because it fits with common sense and another thing to say that it is happening.

[Jade Falcon]

This sketch from the Scots show Burnistoun shows the frustration with the English Language and different dialects.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGbRHtF7eIY

I remember being in Newcastle and hearing a conversation between a Tynesider and a Frenchman speaking English with a heavy French accent and it was easier to understand the Frenchman.

I have found here that there's a gradual americanisation of some parts of British language. For example the increasing use of the word 'vacation' instead of 'holiday', but some of that could be put down to people trying thinking they're being trendy.