Native English speakers are the world’s worst communicators
In a room full of non-native speakers, ‘there isn’t any chance of understanding’. It might be their language, but the message is often lost.
By Lennox Morrison
31 October 2016
Editor’s Note (29 December 2016): Through the end of the year, BBC Capital is bringing back some of your favourite stories from 2016.
It was just one word in one email, but it triggered huge financial losses for a multinational company.
The message, written in English, was sent by a native speaker to a colleague for whom English was a second language. Unsure of the word, the recipient found two contradictory meanings in his dictionary. He acted on the wrong one.
Months later, senior management investigated why the project had flopped, costing hundreds of thousands of dollars. “It all traced back to this one word,” says Chia Suan Chong, a UK-based communications skills and intercultural trainer, who didn't reveal the tricky word because it is highly industry-specific and possibly identifiable. “Things spiralled out of control because both parties were thinking the opposite.”
"Suddenly the American or Brit walks into the room and nobody can understand them - Chia Suan Chong
When such misunderstandings happen, it’s usually the native speakers who are to blame. Ironically, they are worse at delivering their message than people who speak English as a second or third language, according to Chong.
“A lot of native speakers are happy that English has become the world’s global language. They feel they don’t have to spend time learning another language,” says Chong. “But… often you have a boardroom full of people from different countries communicating in English and all understanding each other and then suddenly the American or Brit walks into the room and nobody can understand them.”
(Credit: University of Southampton)
"Native speakers of English generally are monolingual and are not very good at tuning into language variation,” professor Jennifer Jenkins says (Credit: University of Southampton)
The non-native speakers, it turns out, speak more purposefully and carefully, typical of someone speaking a second or third language. Anglophones, on the other hand, often talk too fast for others to follow, and use jokes, slang and references specific to their own culture, says Chong. In emails, they use baffling abbreviations such as ‘OOO’, instead of simply saying that they will be out of the office.
“The native English speaker… is the only one who might not feel the need to accommodate or adapt to the others,” she adds.
Relating to your audience
With non-native English speakers in the majority worldwide, it’s Anglophones who may need to up their game.
"Typically, native English speakers dominate meetings about 90% of the time - Michael Blattner
“Native speakers are at a disadvantage when you are in a lingua franca situation,” where English is being used as a common denominator, says Jennifer Jenkins, professor of global Englishes at the UK’s University of Southampton. “It’s the native English speakers that are having difficulty understanding and making themselves understood.”
Non-native speakers generally use more limited vocabulary and simpler expressions, without flowery language or slang. Because of that, they understand one another at face value. Jenkins found, for instance, that international students at a British university understood each other well in English and swiftly adapted to helping the least fluent members in any group.
‘What the hell is ETA?’
Zurich-based Michael Blattner’s mother tongue is Swiss-German, but professionally he interacts mostly in English. “I often hear from non-native colleagues that they do understand me better when listening to me than when doing so to natives,” says the head of training and proposition, IP Operations at Zurich Insurance Group.
(Credit: Jean-Paul Nerriere)
Jean-Paul Nerriere has devised Globish — a new easier form of English, stripped down to 1,500 words and simple but standard grammar — as a tool (Credit: Jean-Paul Nerriere)
One bugbear is abbreviations.
“The first time I worked in an international context somebody said ‘Eta 16:53’ and I thought ‘What the hell is ETA?’,” says Blattner. “To add to the confusion, some of the abbreviations in British English are very different from American English.”
And then there’s cultural style, Blattner says. When a Brit reacts to a proposal by saying, “That’s interesting” a fellow Brit might recognise this as understatement for, “That’s rubbish.” But other nationalities would take the word “interesting” on face value, he says.
Unusual words, speed of talking and mumbling don’t help, he adds — especially if the phone or video connection is poor quality. “You start disengaging and doing something else because there isn’t any chance of understanding,” he says.
At meetings, he adds, “typically, native English speakers dominate about 90% of the time. But the other people have been invited for a reason.”
"English speakers with no other language often lack awareness of how to speak English internationally - Dale Coulter
Dale Coulter, head of English at language course provider TLC International House in Baden, Switzerland, agrees: “English speakers with no other language often have a lack of awareness of how to speak English internationally.”
In Berlin, Coulter saw German staff of a Fortune 500 company being briefed from their Californian HQ via video link. Despite being competent in English, the Germans gleaned only the gist of what their American project leader said. So among themselves they came up with an agreed version, which might or might not have been what was intended by the California staff.
“A lot of the information goes amiss,” Coulter says.
When simpler is better
It’s the native speaker who often risks missing out on closing a deal, warns Frenchman Jean-Paul Nerriere, formerly a senior international marketing executive at IBM.
“Too many non-Anglophones, especially the Asians and the French, are too concerned about not ‘losing face’ — and nod approvingly while not getting the message at all,” he says.
That’s why Nerriere devised Globish — a distilled form of English, stripped down to 1,500 words and simple but standard grammar. “It’s not a language, it’s a tool,” he says. Since launching Globish in 2004 he’s sold more than 200,000 Globish text books in 18 languages.
“If you can communicate efficiently with limited, simple language you save time, avoid misinterpretation and you don’t have errors in communication,” Nerriere says.
"You need to be short, clear and direct and you need to simplify - Rob Steggles
As an Englishman who’s worked hard to learn French, Rob Steggles, senior marketing director for Europe at telecommunications giant NTT Communications, has advice for Anglophones. Based in Paris, Steggles says, “you need to be short, clear and direct and you need to simplify. But there’s a fine line between doing that and being patronising.”
“It’s a tightrope walk,” he adds.
Giving others a chance
When trying to communicate in English with a group of people with varying levels of fluency, it’s important to be receptive and adaptable, tuning your ears into a whole range of different ways of using English, Jenkins says.
“People who’ve learned other languages are good at doing that, but native speakers of English generally are monolingual and not very good at tuning in to language variation,” she says.
In meetings, Anglophones tend to speed along at what they consider a normal pace, and also rush to fill gaps in conversation, according to Steggles.
“It could be that the non-native speaker is trying to formulate a sentence,” he says. “You just have to wait a heartbeat and give them a chance. Otherwise, after the meeting they come up and say, ‘What was all that about?’ Or they walk away and nothing happens because they haven’t understood.”
He recommends making the same point in a couple of different ways and asking for some acknowledgement, reaction or action.
“If there’s no participation," Steggles cautions, “you don’t know whether you’ve been understood or not.”
The complex world of the global citizen
‘Citizens of the world’ can be seen as individualistic high flyers who want a borderless world. But the reality is far more nuanced, writes Irene Skovgaard-Smith.
By Irene Skovgaard-Smith, Anglia Ruskin University
From The Conversation
10 November 2017
The idea of being a “citizen of the world” is often associated with global elites _ those who shelter their wealth in offshore tax havens or invest their way to citizenship wherever they choose using a “golden visa” route.
This was the “international elite” that the British prime minister, Theresa May, targeted in her conference speech in the wake of the Brexit vote when she argued that: “If you believe you’re a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere.” Her comment draws from a common and longstanding stereotype of cosmopolitans as rootless, uncommitted elites.
The journalist David Goodhart refers to what he calls a tribe of mobile “global villagers” who are likely to identify as citizens of the world. This is the image of individualistic high flyers who benefit from globalisation and want a borderless world. They live in their “global-citizen bubble” and value autonomy and mobility over local and national attachments, community and belonging.
The reality is far more nuanced and complex.
(Credit: Getty Images)
There's no one definition of a global citizen _ they have a range of different backgrounds, motivations and values (Credit: Getty Images)
Cosmopolitans come from many backgrounds
May’s “citizen of nowhere” comment caused widespread controversy. There was a backlash on social media and critique from Londoners, journalists, rival politicians, and the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah _ who has long challenged the assumption that cosmopolitans are rootless.
"Those who embrace cosmopolitan values or see themselves as “global citizens” come from a broad range of social backgrounds and from all over the world
Those who embrace cosmopolitan values or see themselves as “global citizens” come from a broad range of social backgrounds and from all over the world, constituting not one, but many tribes. These include working-class labour migrants, lower-class Creoles in Mauritius as well as young people who have moved to study and globally mobile, middle-class career professionals.
I studied such a group of professionals from 14 different countries including France, Britain, Italy, Mexico, the US, Azerbaijan and Finland, who are living and working in Amsterdam. My research showed how they construct and share a cosmopolitan identity and sense of belonging. This means that they feel less attached to their nation of origin and cultural background. As one British interviewee told me: “I always denounce my nationality.”
But at the same time they also maintain their different national or ethnic identities and cultures _ albeit as ingredients in what some of them called the “melting pot” of their diverse community. They embrace the idea of being a “global person” who has lived in different places and who does not identify with either home or host country. As one French interviewee put it:
"They embrace the idea of being a ‘global person’ who has lived in different places and who does not identify with either home or host country
“If I go home to France, the only people I can relate to are people who have also lived other places, who have been abroad. There is this new nationality which is globalism, you know. I have a French passport, but I don’t feel French. I have lived in Holland for 15 years, but I don’t feel Dutch either.”
(Credit: Alamy)
The expats surveyed by Skovgaard-Smith were proud “Amsterdammers” who had put down roots in the city (Credit: Alamy)
This however does not mean they are rootless. They are proud “Amsterdammers” who have put down roots in the city and call it home. They have become a new kind of “local” _ and live lives just like other middle-class professionals. They work, become unemployed, change careers, buy homes, get married and start families, mostly of mixed nationality. Some have Dutch partners, but many are of other nationalities. They form strong and lasting friendships with people from all over the world that often endure when people move on to other places.
Not a byword for ‘openness’
Some of the people I interviewed referred to their identity using terms such as a “non-nationality” or “an international nationality”. Such a sense of belonging produces its own “us-versus-them” dynamic, in which “them” refers to people who are seen as “monocultural”, or “too narrow-minded” and “can’t cope with people from different cultural backgrounds” as some interviewees described to me. This is not an attitude of unlimited openness.
"Nor does identifying as a citizen of the world necessarily involve allegiance to humanity as a whole, or to one definition of global culture
Nor does identifying as a citizen of the world necessarily involve allegiance to humanity as a whole, or to one definition of global culture. This is a cosmopolitan identity that is local and grounded. It takes shape in the context of diverse social networks in specific places, often in urban environments.
As one interviewee with a mixture of Tanzanian, Ugandan and German backgrounds explained:
“I surround myself with people from everywhere generally speaking. I don’t know any other way than being with people from different places.”
Opportunities to be part of diverse, international communities are predominantly accessible in larger metropolitan cities. For those who do not have access to such social networks, a sense of non-belonging might become dominant. Some of the people I interviewed talked about their experience of “monocultural environments” and it was consistently a negative one.
(Credit: Getty Images)
Global mobility is not a given _ and is likely to become more complicated for British citizens after Brexit (Credit: Getty Images)
They talked about feeling uncomfortable, not fitting in and feeling like they couldn’t trust anyone. One for instance had lived for a short while in a town in Switzerland where her husband is from and where there was little diversity and no international community. Before long they moved on to Sydney, Australia.
"Feelings of non-belonging can further intensify when a rhetoric of exclusion based on national identity gains ground
Feelings of non-belonging can further intensify when a rhetoric of exclusion based on national identity gains ground, such as in the wake of the Brexit vote in the UK. A recent KPMG survey suggested that many highly qualified EU nationals are considering leaving, mainly because of a perception that British society has changed. Half of those surveyed said they felt less valued and welcomed in the UK since the EU referendum.
The ability for people to move to new countries also cannot be taken for granted. Research shows that visas have become increasingly difficult to secure for those who are not citizens of OECD countries. The election of Trump to the US presidency and the UK’s vote for Brexit mean further restrictions on migration and global mobility are on the cards. British citizens, for instance, are unlikely to retain the right to free movement in the EU after Brexit, and vice versa.
These developments mean that some people who have moved across national borders now face an increasingly uncertain and precarious future.
Dr Irene Skovgaard-Smith is a senior lecturer at Lord Ashcroft International Business School, Anglia Ruskin University. This article originally appeared on The Conversation, and is republished under a Creative Commons licence.
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