Text 2-20. Business English lingua franca in intercultural (business) communication

(After Anne Kankaanranta)

Anne Kankaanranta, Ph.D., MSc (Econ), is Senior Lecturer and Researcher of English Business Communication (undergraduate level) and International Business Communication (graduate level) at the Helsinki School of Economics.

Typically, the term intercultural is used as a synonym for international in the sense that it is used to refer to communication taking place between people with international backgrounds. Thus, a different cultural background equals to a different national background, which suggests that the communicators do not share the same mother tongue. In such situations the communicators basically have two options: first, one party can switch over to the other party’s mother tongue; and second, both can use a common language which is neither party’s native tongue. Both options call for intercultural communication.

Traditionally, speakers of smaller languages such as Finnish have had to resort to a number of foreign languages in order to do business with Spanish, French, German, and English speakers simply because in the international arena nobody speaks Finnish.

Previously, in the corporate sector, only a few employees such as export or import managers had contacts across borders. A special group of foreign language experts, usually secretaries, dealt with business correspondence with international clients. Since language is closely intertwined with culture, this choice of the other party’s native tongue meant that the non-native speakers had to adapt, for example, their discourse practices and non-verbal behavior to match those of the native speakers.

In today’s business environment, the first option of switching over to the other party’s native tongue in intercultural encounters is increasingly giving way to the second option: using a common language, a lingua franca. As we all know, the lingua franca of today’s business world is English, which enables communication among business practitioners coming from a variety of cultural backgrounds.

Recently, this phenomenon has also drawn attention in the popular press. For example, it was discussed at length in a Financial Times article of 11 Sept. 2007 called "Whose English?", which estimated that the number of native speakers of English is around 400 million, whereas one quarter of the world’s population can communicate reasonably well in English. It has also been estimated that around 80% of all interactions in English take place between non-native speakers. In the business context, the reasons for this increasing usage of English lingua franca (ELF) are connected with the globalization of both business operations and communication technology.

The recent wave of international mergers and acquisitions together with the emergence of new types of company networks and partnerships meant that a large proportion of members and employees of such entities had to be able to use ELF professionally, in other words, they needed to work in English. In multinational companies, English is typically the corporate language, which is used in such corporate functions as accounting, finance, management, and communications, whereas in the late 1980s ‘Business English’ was still mainly used with native English speakers in foreign trade transactions. (‘Business English’ can be defined as a subcategory of English, English for Specific Purposes or ESP, which was taught as the language used in business contexts.) Also, because of the huge advances in communication technology, it is easy to obtain personal contact across the globe via email, SMS messaging and the like in a matter of seconds.

Thus, there is no need and no time for English language experts. All in all, we could argue that English plays the same role in multinational corporations as the mother tongue does in domestically operating companies or other monolingual work environments: it is used to get the job done.

To emphasize the increasing use of English in these intercultural business situations, we have called this language variety Business English Lingua Franca, BELF (see Louhiala-Salminen et al. 2005).

BELF is used in the global business community to conduct business: it is a ‘neutral’ code used by business practitioners to do their work. Thus, it is not used at emulating native-speaker discourse but simply to get the job done. Indeed, it could be argued that BELF is a new professional language, which has emerged and occupied its niche in the past two decades. It is clearly different from ‘Business English’, which is a language to be studied and learned with the native-speaker model in mind. Although BELF communication can also be studied and learned to some degree outside its context of use (see Kankaanranta & Louhiala-Salminen 2007), it is primarily a variety which is created in actual use because of its sensitivity to contextual constraints.

The conception of BELF as a neutral professional language is not unproblematic, however (see e.g. Charles 2007). For example, some users will always be more proficient than others – not only because of their ‘superior’ English skills but also because of their highly effective business communication skills. Also, the relationship between culture and BELF is not a simple one. Meierkord (2002) has presented two opposing views of the relationship between culture and the lingua franca.

The first one argues that the ‘neutrality’ of the lingua franca code suggests that it is also ‘culture-neutral’ because its speakers do not share a particular cultural background. And the other one, which Meierkord agrees with, argues that it carries culture like any other language because every speaker using a lingua franca has a cultural background.

Drawing on this, we could argue that BELF carries culture on two levels: BELF users share the international business culture but are separated by their personal, specific cultural background that is not typically identical to the cultural background of another BELF user.

In this article, I base my discussion on this latter view emphasizing BELF as a carrier of culture, which we have discussed thoroughly in the ESP journal article English as a lingua franca in Nordic corporate mergers: Two case companies ( see Louhiala-Salminen et al. 2005).

I thus argue that BELF communication is always intercultural: BELF speakers share the ‘B’, i.e. the context and culture of business, the ‘E’, i.e. English and its discourse practices, but are separated by the culture connected with their various native tongues, their discourse practices, and particularly their hidden, implicit rules of communication.

The focus of this article is the use of BELF in intercultural business communication in the globalizing environment. I briefly present two major research projects housed at the Helsinki School of Economics (HSE), which focus on language and cultural issues in multinational corporations. Finally, I describe how we at HSE have been inspired by these projects to develop our courses in English and International Business Communication to meet the challenges of the globalizing business.

Finnish, Swedish, or English? In-house communication in recently merged Finnish-Swedish corporations

The first research project carried out in 2000-2002 focused on company-internal communication and dealt with two corporate mergers over the Gulf of Bothnia. In both cases a Finnish company merged with a Swedish one in the late 1990s and two new corporations were formed (see Louhiala-Salminen et al. 2005). One of them is a globally operating paper manufacturer and the other a banking group whose markets used to be in Scandinavia but have since expanded to the Baltic countries.

The paper company chose English as their corporate language and the bank initially opted for Swedish as the ‘reporting language and the language for management’. At this point, it is essential to remember that Swedish is the second official language of Finland with some 6% of the population speaking it as their mother tongue.

The starting point for our research was to find out how the employees of the new entities coped with the new linguistic and cultural challenges of the cross-border mergers. We started with a communication survey and interviews in both companies to find out about their communication practices and, in particular, how the Finnish and Swedish employees perceived their each other’s communication cultures. We then analyzed meetings and emails to see if, and how, the survey findings were reflected in authentic data. Here I primarily focus on some of the survey findings and on email messages written in English and exchanged between Finns and Swedes in the paper company.

The findings from the survey were based on around 400 responses from a randomly selected group of Finnish and Swedish employees in both companies (for the full report, see Louhiala-Salminen 2002). The respondents represented different organizational positions, units, and ages. The most interesting findings concerning intercultural issues are related to language choice on both the individual and corporate level and the perceptions about Finnish vs. Swedish communication.

On the individual level, language choice seemed to be a highly pragmatic one: English was used if the participants did not share a mother tongue. Around 20% of all internal communication took place in English and the rest in the respective mother tongue.

Swedish was used to some extent in social settings. On the corporate level, the bank’s decision to use Swedish as the ‘reporting language’ was considered problematic, especially by the Finns. They pointed out how the Swedes gained the upper hand since they were able to use their mother tongue, whereas most Finns had to resort to a foreign language, which they felt they did not master so well. Finns applauded the change of the ‘reporting’ language to English a few years later when the bank expanded into Denmark.

The survey findings related to the Finnish and Swedish respondents’ perceptions of each other’s communication cultures seemed to support the anecdotal evidence of issue-oriented, direct Finns who are economical with words and people-oriented Swedes who enjoy talking. When Finns and Swedes described their own communication, they used positive language such as ‘effective’ vs. ‘open discussion’, whereas the characterizations of their partner’s communication were more negative, such as ‘too direct’ vs. ‘endless talk’.

All in all, it was a question of how much talk was considered effective communication. Both Finns and Swedes considered their own communication effective and the other’s less so. Although the respondents found it difficult to separate the impact of national, corporate, and organizational cultures, it was evident that BELF communication carried such characteristics that were explained by the cultural background of the user. Here it must be noted, however, that the survey questions might have guided the respondents to emphasize nationality as an explanatory factor.