Our mother tongue disturbs our business English

The Carlsberg Foundation has given its first large grant of DKK 5.6 million to CBS. The aim of the research is to discover how English works as a business language in a globalised world

When people from all corners of the world meet, English is often the primary spoken language. English has also become the business language in Danish organisations and companies - we are actually talking about "Global English". But even though we master the English language, do we in fact understand what is being said? 

Good English is not necessarily easier to understand

- We think that we understand each other better than we actually do when we speak Global English, says Per Durst-Andersen, Professor from the Department of International Business Communication at CBS. He is in charge of the research project "Global English as an international business language: The mother tongue's influence on speech production, reception and association".

Per Durst-Andersen's work is based on a thesis that "the cultural mental universe has a disturbing effect". He refers to existing research, which points towards a conclusion that the mother tongue is in the way for those who do not speak English as a first language. And the research does not become less relevant considering the fact that Asian business executives become more and more interesting to the Western countries and that Global English particularly fails in this context.

- Surveys show that good English does not mean a better understanding or that it is easier to pull in an order. We know that it is actually more a question of seeing each other at eye level. In fact, bad English in China is more understandable and acceptable if the Chinese is bad at English him-/herself. If not, the Chinese will lose face - and the other party will lose his order, says Per Durst-Andersen.

The Danes are not better at ’Global English’

Even if Danish and English have more in common than English and Asian, there are still plenty of misunderstandings - also if the Dane's spoken English is beautiful.

- Often it is not something we think about, because the two languages are so closely related. The fact is that the Dane does not communicate on the basis of the cultural mental universe of the English language, but on the basis of a universe derived from the mother tongue and the DNA. Different associations attached to a word, for instance rice pudding/risengrød, beer/øl or angry/vred, he says and continues:

- Compared to Chinese and Russian, for instance, there is a huge difference between those languages and English. A Dane and an English-speaking person speaks in information bits, while the Russian and Chinese sender describes the situation, he/she is referring to. An Englishman would say: ”I got stuck in a taxi”, and then we will have to figure out the rest. A Chinese person would say: ”I was in a taxi in a traffic jam”, says Per Durst-Andersen.

• Besides the grant from the Carlsberg Foundation of DKK 5.6 million, CBS has contributed  DKK 1 million to the project.

• The project will be run by Per Durst-Andersen, three PhDs, two postdocs and a research assistant.

• The project will start 1 January and will run for three years.