Letter from Zürich: The Pitfalls of Speaking English

Of course I should count myself lucky. Here I am, a native speaker of English, and so many of my major European clients use English as their business language, even for training. Sometimes though, despite my best efforts, I cannot seem to get my message across. My clients seem to be speaking another kind of English. It’s the Americans all over again – “America and England are two nations separated by a common language” as George Bernard Shaw put it.

Of course I am not the first to notice this phenomenon. Recently there has been a whole swathe of different articles about Globish – a new dialect of English used by non-native speakers to communicate with each other. A new dialect but not an insignificant one – Jürgen Beneke of the University of Hildesheim in Germany claims that a full 80% of all English conversations are between non-native speakers of English.

The term Globish was reportedly coined by Jean Paul Nerrière, a French former IBM executive who worked in Japan in the 80s and 90s. He claims that Globish has a basic vocabulary of 1500 words, uses simple sentence structures and avoids idioms.

Interestingly, he goes on to say that speakers of Globish much prefer to speak to other Globish speakers, than to native speakers of English. His plea is that native speakers of English embrace Globish and help it to develop. After all, Nerrière says: “We want to speak simple English, but correct English”.

For a company like LINE, Globish brings both challenges and opportunities. We have always done business in Continental Europe but since opening our office in Zurich a lot more of our work comes from this territory. This means that we have to become fluent in Globish ourselves, if we are to communicate effectively with our clients and partners.

Speaking in Globish means ensuring that our communication is very simple and direct. I remember once writing an e-mail to partners in Asia and saying: “I very much think we should rewrite the content”. To my British mind what I had written was polite but it was very plain what I wanted – I was telling them to rewrite the content. However, it was interpreted as me merely giving my opinion which they could accept or ignore as they saw fit. What I should have written is: “Please rewrite the content. It is unacceptable as it is” – very forceful to the ear of a British speaker but perfectly acceptable to a Globish speaker.

Also, Globish is the ideal language for e-learning. It uses short, simple sentences and a basic vocabulary and yet it is still acceptable to the global business world as a way to communicate with each other. Of course, it means giving up my academic pretensions (why write “attempt” when you can use “try” or indeed “insignificant” when I could have used “unimportant” or rewritten the sentence”?). I will just have to save the bigger words for the novel gathering dust under my desk …

by Ade Derbyshire-Moore