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RE: Resisting the English-language hegemony
Following up on a recent discussion on the French forum: Speaking English is harder than you think I was disappointed by Dresdner Kleinwort's response to the recent claim of discrimination by Malcolm Perry, an Australian staff member. Mr Perry, DrK's former head of fixed income and credit, claimed he was pushed out for not being German or being able to speak the language. I had hoped Dresdner was going to argue that while it did not matter what passports its executives carried, it was perfectly reasonable to expect senior officers of a German bank to speak German. Instead, the bank admitted it had dismissed Mr Perry unfairly but strongly denied discrimination. In his witness statement, Stefan Jentzsch, DrK's chief executive, listed several senior executives of various nationalities who did not speak German. They did not need to, he said. "English is the language in which Dresdner Kleinwort communicates." (The case, heard by an employment tribunal in London, where Mr Perry was based, has yet to be decided.) I imagine there are German managers working at German companies who feel sore about not getting to the top because their English is not good enough. But then English is the language of international business. You would not get very far without it. Globalisation required a common language and English is it. As a second-generation speaker of the language, I am gratefully aware of the opportunities this has afforded me. But it would not be a bad thing if we native speakers thought occasionally about the effort people put into speaking a language that is not theirs. I spent three years working as a correspondent in Greece, attending press conferences and conducting interviews. There was often a simultaneous translation and many senior Greeks were happy to speak English. But some were not, and I did the interviews in Greek. I managed, but I remember the fatigue and the worry. The fatigue comes from having to concentrate so hard. When people are speaking your native tongue, you can let your mind wander, think about the next question, even glance out of the window, safe in the knowledge that you can refocus the moment something important is said. You do not have that luxury in a foreign language. Lose the thread and you will find it hard to pick it up again. You worry constantly that you have missed or misunderstood something. In 1991 Percy Barnevik, the leader of giant Swiss-Swedish conglomerate ABB, told the Harvard Business Review that fluency in English was a requirement for every senior manager in the company. But he knew what difficulties this created. "Only 30 per cent of our managers speak English as their first language, so there is great potential for misunderstanding, for misjudging people, for mistaking facility with English for intelligence or knowledge." Many international companies have adopted English as their working language since then and experienced the same problems. Yet, given how long the issue has been around, this is a curiously under-researched field, possibly because studying it would require the co-operation of two groups who do not generally have much to do with each other: business school academics and applied linguists. In a working paper , Alan Feely of Birmingham Business School and Anne-Wil Harzing of Melbourne University wrote: "The notion that cultural differences can be a significant barrier to doing business is now commonly accepted." Few, however, made the connection between culture and one of its principal manifestations: language. They quoted various writers referring to language issues in business as "the most neglected field in management", "the management orphan" and "the forgotten factor". Pamela Rogerson-Revell, an applied linguist at Leicester University, is one of the few working in the area . She studied meetings held in English by the Groupe Consultatif Actuariel Européen, representing actuarial associations around Europe. One continental European actuary mentioned how hard it was to make a spontaneous contribution in English. "I was sitting . . . listening to the discussion. Suddenly I thought that the meeting was missing an essential point and I started to plan an intervention. It took me a few minutes to prepare myself, especially to find the right English words etc, and suddenly I realised that the discussion had moved on to another subject." Another problem for non-native speakers is idiomatic expressions. I remember a briefing for the British press by a French company. The chief executive, who spoke good English, was thrown by one of my colleagues asking whether a change of strategy was "a case of horses for courses". Of course, a lot of business communication in English these days takes place between Italians and Germans, or Bulgarians and Belgians, without any native speakers present. It must be a relief. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/f52d0b12-7080-11dc-a6d1-0000779fd2ac.html
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