I agree with this totally and I am a native English speaker. English often has many confusing and ambiguous terms that can only be known by having a very well developed sense of context.
Have many non-native English speaking friends, I understand their difficulty with the language. When communicating with my friends I try and choose appropriate words to avoid misunderstanding until I can grasp the level at which they understand English. It bothers me when I see other people communicate to non-english speakers and they either get irritated or they don't understand how what they said could be misunderstood. It is as if they've never evaluated the difficulty of their own language.
Then it gets even worse because in casual conversation people will throw in all kinds of slang and just totally made up words. As native English speakers you can pick them apart and get an idea of what's happening even if you don't know the specific slang. A non-native speaker has no hope at all.
With all communication it's important to know your audience and address them in a way they can understand.
Here is another BBC article, from which I learned that this international insurance company has organized training for native speakers to speak in a more understandable manner:
> After taking an in-company e-learning course to help native English speakers communicate better with non-native speakers, Barron slowed down his pace of speaking and edited his “American speak” to avoid jargon and idioms that don’t translate globally.
Thanks for linking to this article. Can anyone recommend a place to get this kind of training for those of us who don't work at a company that offers it? I'm a monoglot American living in a midwestern city where I'm mostly surrounded by other such Americans, but I want to raise my awareness of how I might be a bad communicator.
In the UK, there is a campaigning organisation called the 'Plain English Campaign' which promotes clear, easy-to-understand written English suitable for any industry or profession.
Although, the organisation is based in the UK, their advice is relevant for anyone who writes or reads English.
Here is their clear, simple and short guide on How to write in plain English [PDF]:
One thing that I haven't seen mentioned in any language-related discussion is that understanding is often a matter of discarding possible "neighbouring" meanings. To do that, you need to have a comprehensive knowledge of the language.
In English it's particularly bad because of the proximity between some vowels. In many cases a monosyllabic word is one of six or seven almost identical. And that's for basic vocabulary. Think bird, bear, beard, bore, bar, boar, beer, birth, born, burn, bier... when someone is whispering the words or talking over a noisy medium.
I’ve experienced this problem for native and non-native speakers alike, where perfectly capable English speakers almost freeze up when they mishear a word, rather than try to help the conversation along. I’d usually ask the other party to spell it out, whereas some simply drop the conversation dead and awkward silence ensues.
> perfectly capable English speakers almost freeze up when they mishear a word, rather than try to help the conversation along.
As a person who speaks a second language I learned as an adult, I find this situation incredibly difficult to negotiate.
In my first language, I can get through almost any such situation by using humour. In my second language, at best, I can manage 'just one more time?' with a frowny face.
I often think - why wasn't I taught this skill in any language school I attended?
Have you ever been to France and tried speaking French after a few years of study? Have you ever had to deal with someone there who speaks far better English than you, but refuses to because of snobbery?
Yes, I thought I was being funny with my exaggerated french accent. They just found it clearer. Unfortunately this makes them think I have better french than I actually do and they speak to fast.
I found in Paris, the easiest way to communicate was to speak English with an exaggerated French accent, and throw in the few words of French I know. In the other parts of France I've been to, English was effectively useless; I made do with broken German. This wasn't for conversation, but conveying information, buying stuff etc.
Have you ever spoken to a Glaswegian while imitating their accent and found that they understand you better?
I was really worried that people would think I was making fun of them, but, in reality, they just thought that my horrible American accent had gotten a little bit better. :)
I think enjoying parroting is one of the keys of getting good at pronunciation in a second language as an adult. If you smile while doing so it'll probably help the conversation along too.
I even have to do that with Australians as a Kiwi - asking for a "pen" sounds to them like I want a "pin", so I have to stretch my vowels and ask for a "peeen" which sounds to me like I'm taking the piss, but they don't seem to take offense, and then hand me a pen.
As an aussie, I guess I might notice you sound a bit odd but appreciate that you are making an extra effort over and above the usual. Not going to complain about that!
Also, given how poorly aussie accent is portrayed in so many TV shows and movies - even by australian actors because "they have to" - we might be used to it and see your effort as pretty minimal.
The comment you are replying to is exhibiting the result of the article's poor communication style. The way it was written comes across as too confrontational and sets people up to be defensive.
Even English speakers sometimes miss this context. I played FFXI, and it had an auto-translate feature (hit tab to enclose certain words, to translate to the reader's language). Very useful with some care taken to understand what you're writing.
A lot of people didn't put enough thought into how they used it though, and tripped over many English homonyms/colloquialisms. For example putting {cap} as a synonym for 'limit', when it meant 'hat'. So when they wanted help with the level 50 limit quest, Japanese players must have been confused why all the Americans are talking about level 50 hat quests.
I'm a native English speaker and I find the use of colloquialisms, abbreviations, and the like frustrating as well. There is no good reason to not take care in the choice of words when communicating in a professional setting, regardless of the language used or the native language(s) audience receiving the communication.
I try to work really hard on not using too many idioms and sayings in slack. Same goes for memes specific to American culture. Or if I use one accidentally, define the meaning.
OTOH sometimes other native English speakers get frustrated with this, and I’ll hear feedback like “YES WE KNOW WHAT THAT MEANS” when in reality this person is just speaking for themselves...
It’s a tricky balance because if I know someone has a shared cultural context, idioms, etc can make the communication more fluid, efficient etc. So I find it’s a constant calibration.
>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.
>When such misunderstandings happen, it’s usually the native speakers who are to blame.
So...somebody got a message they felt was ambiguous and confused them, didn't ask for clarification before acting upon it, made a huge mistake but it was the person who sent the message originally's fault?
Personally, having been in the opposite situation, where i'm one of the only native English speakers at a workplace. If i didn't understand something somebody wrote or said to me, i made damn sure i double checked with them before i actually did anything.
>> but it was the person who sent the message originally's fault?
That's not what the article said at all. It seemed to place the blame on the word. I'm with you that one person should have sought clarification since they knew there were two meanings, but that's not actually the root cause. Another person may have only been aware of one of those meanings and made the "mistake" without ever thinking they needed clarification. The problem was the use of ambiguous language.
I find it really amusing to see someone thinking they blamed the sender. It seems like another example of how English speakers are so used to having to interpret words.
I understood they were blaming the word. Words don't appear out of nowhere. The word was written by the sender, the implication is the sender's choice of words caused the problem which could have been avoided by using a different word.
I disagree with this premise and believe the problem could have been avoided had the receiver taken the self responsibility to make sure they fully understood the message before acting upon it and if they had doubts, such as when they found two contradictory meanings, should have just simply asked for clarification.
If you don't understand something, it's on you. I've been misunderstood, i've misunderstood other people and the easiest thing anyone can do in that situation is say:
'sorry i didn't quite get that' or 'sorry could you explain what you mean'
The article specifically says that native english speakers are to blame, not the word.
> 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.
>> 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.”
Yeah, where does it say that? We could blame the sender for choosing an ambiguous word, or we could blame the recipient for not getting clarification, but they clearly place it on the word without pointing a finger at either human.
The overall article does point a finger at native english speakers for being imprecise, but the specific example doesn't IMHO.
>i made damn sure i double checked with them before i actually did anything.
Ahh well, most non-native speakers would be concerned about their English proficiency level. For some that would be a quality worth mentioning in the hiring process.
My experience would that most people will shut off and don't ask for clarification but try and fill the gaps. It's a rather common issue.
Agreed. The article is a fluff piece, using the most generic and sanitized anecdotes. What WORD was not understood? What was the culture of the sender vs receiver? Did I miss where there was any statistical information presented in the article? What other languages/native speakers were reviewed before determining English speakers won the title of world's worst communicators?
You're right, it wasn't a very clear article. Kinda fluffy actually. But it did have one good point: that native English speakers often are not required to learn a second language to facilitate business, and so are less aware of the intricacies of intercultural communications (whereas everyone else had to learn English as a second language, so they're on more or less equal footing with each other).
Even in the English-speaking world, we run into similar issues communicating across borders, whether that's cultural differences across states, urban/rural divides, regional accents, or across countries (US/UK/Australia/South Africa/India, etc.)
I don't think the article presented enough evidence to support the headline that "native English speakers are the worst communicators". It's less about English vs any mother tongue being worse or better; rather, bilingualism has numerous benefits (intercultural communications being one of them), but many in the Anglosphere are not bilingual (because they're not forced to be, unlike people who have to learn English as a second language): https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21428634-000-oh-to-be...
TLDR: Fluffy article, interesting underlying point
The claims made here are tied to the fact that English is more or less the primary language of international business. Its well known that people who learn secondary languages tend to know the "rules" around the language and tend to be more specific when using secondary languages.
Its pretty weird for the article to conflate using slang/abbreviations/language tied to cultural norms from a primary speaker as being unable to communicate.
Other languages have built in cultural connotations that pretty much only matter within their specific culture that doesn't really make sense outside of it.
Sure when knowingly speaking to a multicultural audience, its probably for the best to not use idioms and such, but the failures of communication is not tied to the fact that English is being used.
I wonder where you are from, I for one really recognize this. N=1 but my native speaking colleague indeed dominates meetings. Of course personality is also a factor, but she also talks at incredible speeds in fancy ways that are almost hypnotic. It has made her our fall back when talking needs to be done. But in fact I sometimes feel that I should have conveyed a message myself because she gets the point I wanted to make slightly wrong in worrying ways.
On a different note, we always jokingly use Dutch saying in English:
You're missing the point of the article. If you're Scottish, it's probably hard to not use local flavor when talking, and thus it's hard for an international audience to understand. Even if you know the audience is international. It's just the way you talk.
If you're from Portugal, and you speak English, you're mostly not using some local flavor Portuguese words or expressions or jokes because they wouldn't make sense in English. So you speak simply and you're easy to understand.
Yeah, it gives the language ambiguity and nuance. It's pretty flipping valuable for the day to day poetry of the language. I personally derive a lot of humour from the ambiguity of the language.
I do recall a colleague of mine who was trying to learn English. He said I was one of the more difficult english speakers he'd ever met. It was fun to try to reel that in to be more clear. Eventually I just directed him to the urban dictionary.
I think the problem is that the way English phrases things is often completely bizarre compared to virtually any other language, which is confusing, as a seemingly straightforward sentence may imply something completely unexpected.
I think it might be because of its lack of real grammatical topic, which is otherwise ubiquitous and often more important than the subject.
I think a lot of this odd structuring is due to English leaning heavily on borrowed forms and rules that really have no ties to the underlying language.
Not that I'm blaming the language, just think it's curious at how many conflicting and skewed rules have just become a part of the language over hundreds of years.
> Other languages have built in cultural connotations that pretty much only matter within their specific culture that doesn't really make sense outside of it.
I once was trying to contact an engineer that had worked on a project before me. Their last name in git was just "R". After some searching and asking another colleague I found out that this is a special last name that is abbreviated that way.
> Native English speakers are the world's worst communicators
The article makes this claim, but doesn't substantiate it. The content of the article has nothing to do with a comparative study on communication. Always disappointing to see clickbait from the BBC.
I suggest the title be changed to something like Native English speaker are generally bad at tuning into language variation.
I'd suggest "People are generally bad at tuning into language variation." I'm not sure that native English speakers have any particular lock on that.
They may get more opportunities to make that mistake, since (a) they're often monolingual, and (b) they're more likely to be speaking to a non-native speaker (what with English being the international language these days). But it's not inherent to either the language or the speakers.
This explains a lot. I only speak English, but I've been working on communicating more clearly. I used to provide a lot of backstory/context when talking because I wanted people to know how to interpret what I was about to say. It turns out the real problem was me not speaking plainly and simply. When you use the right words people are more likely to take what you say at face value (that's probably a phrase I shouldn't use) rather than assume some interpretation of it.
English is a very flexible and expressive language, but those features aren't what you want to use for precise communication.
Insofar as efficiency equates with precision (kind of, I would have thought), here's some data that doesn't take your view. English comes out top out of seven popular languages but only just.
I know Swedish, so my comment is that English frequently feels imprecise. If you want to make sure a sentence will be interpreted unambiguously, you have to pile on a lot of extra verbiage, which people don't normally do because precision is not that important in most cases. By contrast, Swedish normally leaves less room for multiple interpretations, which makes brevity easier to achieve.
The gist here is that English needs to be dumbed down and stripped of any cultural references in order to be intelligible to an international business audience. No surprises there.
To say that "native English speakers are the world's worst communicators" is quite a bold claim. Personally, I'd give that title to native French speakers.
The statement "native English speakers are the world's worst communicators" is true because of the large number of English speakers in an international context, even when the average "badness" of an English speaker is no worse than of a French speaker.
I was going to follow up with a similar quip, but I think we're falling into old crypto-nationalistic stereotypes and maybe we should all try to be better, so...
"Personally, I'd give that title to middlemanagers who were promoted beyond their abilities."
I agree, it drives me nuts when I see bad hot takes on the English language by Anglophones. Articles in English about English are more often than not egocentric and short sighted.
I heard an Englishman quip that English is the only language where you can tell a person's class by their accent. Or a lot of people think English is the hardest language to learn because of its irregularities or terrible spelling rules. Or that our slang is somehow exceptional. Most of these people don't have enough experience in other languages to have any idea how they compare to English.
> To say that "native English speakers are the world's worst communicators" is quite a bold claim. Personally, I'd give that title to native French speakers.
I'm a native English speaker with French as my second language. In my experience "Business French" doesn't have nearly as many problems as English.
My weird anecdote. English is a not native language for me (Russian is my native language) and I have issues listening to native English persons, but I have almost no issues listening to English with Russian accent. So, I guess, that depends on a receiving side.
I shouldn't start on these but I fail to resist, since you bring one of them on the discussion.
This is one of numerous "faux-amis" that are so tricky for native French speakers. While "fameux" has the meaning an English speaker would expect, "Infâme" means odious. Other examples include "éventuellement" that means possibly (and not surely in the future), "actuellement" which translates as "nowadays" (and not really) etc.
It may be chauvinism, but etymological and geographical clues let be believe that most of these are french words that have been imported into English and whose meanings changed radically. Admittedly, some probably share a common latin origin and were declined into similar words but retaining a different subset of their original meanings.
It is often a source of weird misunderstandings between native French and English speakers, neither of which are famous for their mastery at learning foreign languages...
I think it's used in marketing sometimes because it sounds cool, so you'll assume it means something good if you don't understand it. Doesn't come up a lot though.
It seemed somewhat plausible or serious to me because "ultimate" is slang for "really cool" in India. (At least it was when I was growing up; who knows what the cool kids there say these days.) But I was puzzled because I've spent the majority of my adult life in North America, and never heard "penultimate" used that way.
I was wrong. Apparently it is slang, in some places at least:
> The word penultimate as a slang word seems to have worked its way into common parlance thanks to the slang use of the word ultimate. As a slang term, ultimate means cool rather than last. So the hipster logic may have concluded that if ultimate means cool, then penultimate must mean super cool.
While the french equivalent "pénultième" is rarely heard and considered as pedantic, "antépénultième" is actually much more frequently used to avoid the ugly "avant-avant-dernier" (very really awesome).
This is clickbait. Much of what is presented as evidence of how bad native English speakers are would apply to people of other languages if they were the natives and English speakers were the guests.
But with respect to the one word financial loss, it sounds like the receiver is ultimately to blame because they chose to act without confirming the meaning of the original message.
Sure, the writer could have considered the ambiguity and been more specific or explicit, but the receiver made a choice and ran with it.
You can learn how to be better understood as a native speaker without having to go abroad or even speak to a lot of people using English as a second language.
In the UK, live in a city like Birmingham, for instance, with a strong local accent and even, in some parts like the Black Country, a unique syntax, e.g. "How am ya?".
Now go live for a while in, for the sake of argument, Glasgow, with their own particular patois and accent.
Why does this article make me think the problem is perhaps mainly with those native English speakers who haven't been exposed much to their own language as it's spoken in the regions?
Even easier: pick up an introductory Greek or Latin textbook. I didn't know English grammar until I bought a Greek book and worked through it on my own.
Greek and/or Latin will get you to "schoolbook English" grammar... which was deliberately designed to make learning Greek and Latin easier, and has only a distant relationship to the actual grammar of English.
Conversely, I lived for a while with a Glaswegian who had moved to the South of England, having lived his whole life in Glasgow. It was interesting watching him realise that he had to moderate his speech, otherwise so much of what he said was lost. Over time, he stopped using some of the specifically regional stuff that nobody understood.
This is complicated because Scots (distinct from Gaelic) is a language - with multiple dialects (you wouldn't speak Doric in Glasgow) - and people from Scotland freely intermix with English. If you've grown up there as an English speaker you may not even realized it until you move somewhere it isn't spoken, so lots of loan words etc. you are used to don't exist.
It's probably not this, but a native English speaker saying "That's the shit!" probably means "That thing is great" but someone who's not very fluent might think the speaker doesn't like the thing.
I guess it happens in all languages. Here in Argentina sometimes you can use some insults as a great compliment to a friend. [It's tricky to know when you can use them, which one, and have the correct intonation and body posture, so don't try it.]
And you can use a compliment like "Muy bien. Te feliciiito." ("Very good. I congratulate you." But with a long ee sound in the middle of the last word) And it means something like "You are an idiot" / "You made a big mistake".
I had a chuckle a while back when here on HN, one poster replied to another with the words: Oh, fuck off! The next sentence was That's amazing! Turns out that they were quite happy about the information in the parent post. Something like "I wish I had known that five years ago."
I thought to myself, that has to be a Brit, but admittedly I'm not familiar enough with the way various native speakers of English use the language to know for sure. To us furriners, it can sure be a bit confusing some times :)
Off the top of my head was it the Citibank Revlon issue? I seem to remember there being a break down in communication between Indian Staff and the US staff.
> 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
Isn’t this a description of native vs non-native speakers in many languages?
There's other cultures where most people don't natively speak the business language/dialect - not all Chinese speakers are native Mandarin for instance.
Actually, there's some Japanese companies that try to use English in the office even if they don't have any foreigners.
Yes. This is just another article trying to attack English by singling it out for scenarios that occur in every language. It's part of human communication and behavior, not a flaw inherent to English. Otherwise, what's the implication, that non-English speakers universally speak slowly and without any kind of idioms or color? That's disproven within a year of learning any new language
Well, there are a lot of Americanisms in business speak that just aren't frequent in international business that the unaware US speaker, for instance, will have difficulty expressing themselves without these colloquialisms or even being aware they are using them if they are not used to it. e.g. with baseball alone,
* in the ballpark of (around)
* touch base (have a short chat for mutual understanding of something)
* dropped the ball (fucked up on something you are responsible for)
* heavy hitter (the one that brings a lot of cash, etc.)
What do you mean by level of detail? That concepts are spelled out more explicitly?
I think most languages and cultures have conceptual shortcuts. Every culture/language has their “Shaka, when the walls fell” from Star Trek (here I go with the conceptual shortcuts).
Gendered articles and honorifics come to mind, that's where for example German has more "details" that afaik don't really exist in a comparable version in English, like duzen vs siezen.
Articles themselves are relatively rare (though they're a European areal feature, to the extent that they're added into some languages that otherwise wouldn't have them). Gender is another thing that isn't universal at all - and where it does exist, is more likely to distinguish between, say, long pointy things, humans, and non-flesh food than between masculine and feminine.
Not like that. It's more about what amount of information you are expected to share in any given context vs. what would be seen as excessive, such as would you expect to hear "there was an accident" or "a valve broke and the cooling fluid spilled".
You won't find things like this in a grammar book, it's kid of more like what bitrate the language aims for.
At the very least Indians, Chinese and Japanese complain about those, and English speakers who learn them face the opposite problem, at least with the latter two, so it isn't a native/non native problem.
> Isn’t this a description of native vs non-native speakers in many languages?
Not necessarily. The key idea from the article in the phrase "specific to their own culture". There isn't one English in the world. There are now many versions which are bound to cultures and differ in the idioms and sayings used. Think about all of the sports based sayings and metaphors you are used to. Many of them won't mean much to English speakers in other countries.
Either way, communicating with people from other cultures, even when using the same language, remains a sticky wicket.
not just idioms but also pronounciation and grammar, e.g. Indian English has it's own grammatical rules distinct from others, and it certainly also applies to British/US English and others.
...which could be generalized as, non-native speakers of a language have more difficulty understanding native speakers. It's a scientific breakthrough, I tell you!
In one episode of Black Books, main character Manny finds out he can play piano. Other character Bernard wants to use it to impress a woman, so he forces Manny to hide inside the piano and play using spoons. Manny does it but later refuses to do it again. To convince him to do it one more time, Bernard offers him one whole week of vacation. Manny looks at Bernard, then extend his arms forwards, palms open up, and says: "spoon me".
In my native language we use declension everywhere. I could awkwardly say the same in my language, something like "olyžicujte ma" (o=equip/cover, lyžica=spoon, ujte=keep doing something, me=ma) - it is technically correct, but english didn't need to change any of those words, it just worked. English can convey the same meaning without unnecessary complexity.
I like this simplicity in language, it feels somehow superior. Simpler is better.
I think what you are talking about is really analytic vs synthetic languages. English is more analytic than most European languages, but there are other languages which are also analytic, like Mandarin, Swedish, and Maori.
In analytic languages, speakers use word order and additional words to convey relationships. However, this does not mean that analytic languages are simpler, it just means that the complexity is different.
For example, English usually requires that you use the correct word order, correct articles, and correct prepositions. "A customer is angry about the movie." You cannot change word order. You must use the correct article ("a" customer, "the" movie), and correct preposition ("angry about", not "angry at"). In some other languages, these details like "a" / "the" are not important.
Sentences like "Spoon me" or "beer me" rely on the fact that English uses word order instead of declension. The sentence must have a verb, and "me" is not a verb, so the word before "me" is treated as a verb. The words are simple and flexible, but the word order is very strict.
When English is your second or third language in the beginning the difficult bits are the pronunciation, and then all the cultural differences. For example, university debt or debt in general is just not a topic in most of EU for those under-25. Hospital runs or calling an ambulance are also a no-brainer because that's free.
One of the major shocks for me was when I heard the story of someone who broke a leg, and stopped a friend from calling an ambulance because it'd be too expensive and instead called a taxi to get to the hospital. A combination of me being younger and naive, and not knowing the US so well back then, so I literally thought they were joking while they were telling it.
I think the point of avoiding acronyms and abbreviations isn't strong enough, because it doesn't explain how much they can creep into most conversation. As an example, here's how something can become gradually less specific, and gradually shortened. (I have an American Midwest accent, so not all of these shortenings will be applicable to all accents.)
> I'm hungry. Would you like to get lunch and continue discussing this as we eat?
Good clear statement, motivation, question, and proposed action. But there's some repetition. If I'm the one suggesting lunch, it can be assumed that I am hungry, so that doesn't need to be mentioned.
> Would you like to get lunch and continue discussing this as we eat?
Now we add in some cultural context, that people generally eat lunch around noon, and that it is generally a social affair. Asking if somebody wants to get lunch implicitly includes the question of having lunch as a group.
> Would you like to get lunch?
In the same manner, rather than asking about the intended action of "having lunch", one can instead ask about previous actions, with the assumption that somebody will join in on a social activity.
> Have you eaten yet?
Depending on the level of formality, both the choice of words and the level of diction can be chosen to progressively shorten the phrase.
> Did you eat yet?
> Didja eat yet?
> Djeet yet?
The last one, when spoken and in the context of a co-worker asking shortly before noon, is understandable as a social request by a native speaker with a similar accent, even though it's missing over half of the syllables needed to even be grammatically correct.
To be fair, "Did you eat yet?" in this context seems to be universal across languages and cultures for office workers. The "Djeet yet?" will naturally be different depending on language and accent, but my point is that this is not exclusive to the English language. Someone who is familiar with the practice of asking if a coworker has eaten their midday meal in their native tongue will recognize the same nuance if they know the literal English translation.
1. At one time in human history, not long ago, it was mandatory to have some facility in at least a 2nd language to claim you had a higher education. Partial mastery of a 2nd language would help native English speakers "get" what it's like for the non-native people and might help them adjust there speaking style. IMHO we have allowed "higher" education in English speaking countries to devolve in this regard.
2. We might be entering an era where English begins to morph into new dialects as did Latin when it was the "Lingua Franca" of the time. The 2nd language population will overwhelm the native English speakers and so control the language.
( "Lingua Franca" is probably one of those terms that one should not use internationally, unless you are in Italy, Spain, France, Portugal or Romania) :)
Until today I thought "Lingua Franca" just meant "French language" and the usage of the phrase signified how commonplace French was in international diplomacy. Glad to learn something new.
"Lingua Franca" refers to an earlier period in history when French was the common language used across Europe, among the nobility in particular. You can read it as "common language for international communication" to understand why it's used to qualify the "globish" variant of English nowadays.
Admittedly, using a latin expression literally describing French to mean English may be slightly confusing...
Thanks for the correction, I was indeed wrong (parts of my comments were based on true facts but parts were clearly wrong, which is harmful). Honest mistake, I'm glad you spotted it so that I avoid propagating it in the future.
To be dishonestly picky, French is somehow etymologically the "language of the Franks"... However, from what I just read, while "lingua franca" designates a vehicular language (which is the main thing to remember about the expression), it was originally used to refer to a simplified mix of languages (Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, French among others).
Thanks again, I guess I made long ago a lazy intellectual shortcut conflating my somehow credible explanation with the actual origin of the expression.
As an older person who probably needs a hearing aid, I have the most problem with native English speakers not enunciating words. They go fast and run words together or mumble like Noam Chomsky. I have sympathy for ESL people trying to parse it. I always turn on subtitles if available. Also, a Brazilian friend says the don't use much sarcasm, so it gets difficult understand when English speakers use it so much to mean the opposite of what they say.
I definitely have had this issue. I'm a native English speaker and taught in Europe for a few years, where a subset of students had trouble understanding me, mostly because I would just drop too many consonants and run words together. E.g. if speaking quickly, I tend to pronounce "because" as one syllable, something like "biz". I've moved towards much more consciously enunciating words in mixed-nationality settings. Americans now sometimes think I sound foreign though!
I work with teams across the globe and I can say this has been true in my experience. The experience of communicating with others for whom English is not only a second language, but a lingua franca used to communicate across other language boundaries, is distinctly not one where I am the advantaged communicator, because I am the less versed speaker of the lingua franca version of the dialect. (Imagine switching from a BSD to Ubuntu with no Linux experience. Lots rhymes and sounds the same, but might trip up an experienced user who has built up years of expectations.)
My wife has been showing me Twogether, a show about two celebrities from different countries whose only common language is English, and who are made to travel and perform tasks together in countries whose languages they don't speak.
It's fascinating to hear the version of English they speak to each other. It's not US or UK English, it's a combination of English, Korean, Chinese, intonation, facial expression, and gesture to communicate what they need in a given moment. It was odd for me to that they were actually able to use English to communicate with each other better than I, a native English speaker, could use to communicate with either of them. Built up context and the tendency of language to take the shape of its container resulted in a patois better suited to their purposes than the language I use every day, and in a business context, pretending this doesn't happen is a recipe for failure, I believe.
I work in a multinational company in a non English speaking country, and we use English officially. I'm not trying to be snobby when I say the English we speak is different from what I would speak in UK, and I've found myself adapting to the special grammar that we use. I've come to the conclusion that there are many equally valid "Englishes", e.g. American, Aussie, Indian, south African etc and being snooty because their particular grammatical styles or pronunciations don't match the ones you grew up with just makes you a prick. Lots of my compatriots still do though.
I was in a class with a Japanese instructor. I had a great deal of trouble understanding him. A hand was raised and a person began talking with a very different accent (Finnish) and I understood very little of that. The Japanese instructor understood the question and replied. I however understood almost nothing of the entire exchange. This may be the future for native English language speakers or perhaps is already the norm in some parts of the world.
If they were speaking Japanese, Finnish (and Spanish) have very similar phonetics, to the point a lot of Finnish words also mean totally unrelated things in Japanese.
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[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 210 ms ] threadHave many non-native English speaking friends, I understand their difficulty with the language. When communicating with my friends I try and choose appropriate words to avoid misunderstanding until I can grasp the level at which they understand English. It bothers me when I see other people communicate to non-english speakers and they either get irritated or they don't understand how what they said could be misunderstood. It is as if they've never evaluated the difficulty of their own language.
Then it gets even worse because in casual conversation people will throw in all kinds of slang and just totally made up words. As native English speakers you can pick them apart and get an idea of what's happening even if you don't know the specific slang. A non-native speaker has no hope at all.
With all communication it's important to know your audience and address them in a way they can understand.
> After taking an in-company e-learning course to help native English speakers communicate better with non-native speakers, Barron slowed down his pace of speaking and edited his “American speak” to avoid jargon and idioms that don’t translate globally.
https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20161215-you-need-to-go...
Although, the organisation is based in the UK, their advice is relevant for anyone who writes or reads English.
Here is their clear, simple and short guide on How to write in plain English [PDF]:
http://www.plainenglish.co.uk/files/howto.pdf
In English it's particularly bad because of the proximity between some vowels. In many cases a monosyllabic word is one of six or seven almost identical. And that's for basic vocabulary. Think bird, bear, beard, bore, bar, boar, beer, birth, born, burn, bier... when someone is whispering the words or talking over a noisy medium.
As a person who speaks a second language I learned as an adult, I find this situation incredibly difficult to negotiate.
In my first language, I can get through almost any such situation by using humour. In my second language, at best, I can manage 'just one more time?' with a frowny face.
I often think - why wasn't I taught this skill in any language school I attended?
This article is trash
I was really worried that people would think I was making fun of them, but, in reality, they just thought that my horrible American accent had gotten a little bit better. :)
Also, given how poorly aussie accent is portrayed in so many TV shows and movies - even by australian actors because "they have to" - we might be used to it and see your effort as pretty minimal.
I'd give you a pen anyday. Have a good one!
A lot of people didn't put enough thought into how they used it though, and tripped over many English homonyms/colloquialisms. For example putting {cap} as a synonym for 'limit', when it meant 'hat'. So when they wanted help with the level 50 limit quest, Japanese players must have been confused why all the Americans are talking about level 50 hat quests.
OTOH sometimes other native English speakers get frustrated with this, and I’ll hear feedback like “YES WE KNOW WHAT THAT MEANS” when in reality this person is just speaking for themselves...
It’s a tricky balance because if I know someone has a shared cultural context, idioms, etc can make the communication more fluid, efficient etc. So I find it’s a constant calibration.
>When such misunderstandings happen, it’s usually the native speakers who are to blame.
So...somebody got a message they felt was ambiguous and confused them, didn't ask for clarification before acting upon it, made a huge mistake but it was the person who sent the message originally's fault?
Personally, having been in the opposite situation, where i'm one of the only native English speakers at a workplace. If i didn't understand something somebody wrote or said to me, i made damn sure i double checked with them before i actually did anything.
That's not what the article said at all. It seemed to place the blame on the word. I'm with you that one person should have sought clarification since they knew there were two meanings, but that's not actually the root cause. Another person may have only been aware of one of those meanings and made the "mistake" without ever thinking they needed clarification. The problem was the use of ambiguous language.
I find it really amusing to see someone thinking they blamed the sender. It seems like another example of how English speakers are so used to having to interpret words.
I disagree with this premise and believe the problem could have been avoided had the receiver taken the self responsibility to make sure they fully understood the message before acting upon it and if they had doubts, such as when they found two contradictory meanings, should have just simply asked for clarification.
If you don't understand something, it's on you. I've been misunderstood, i've misunderstood other people and the easiest thing anyone can do in that situation is say:
'sorry i didn't quite get that' or 'sorry could you explain what you mean'
or something along those lines.
In an age of trigger culture and micro aggressions this article is a prejudicial sucker punch to native speakers of English.
I find it irritating that the hook is a super-secret word that cannot be shared with the reader.
> 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.
Yeah, where does it say that? We could blame the sender for choosing an ambiguous word, or we could blame the recipient for not getting clarification, but they clearly place it on the word without pointing a finger at either human.
The overall article does point a finger at native english speakers for being imprecise, but the specific example doesn't IMHO.
Ahh well, most non-native speakers would be concerned about their English proficiency level. For some that would be a quality worth mentioning in the hiring process.
My experience would that most people will shut off and don't ask for clarification but try and fill the gaps. It's a rather common issue.
Even in the English-speaking world, we run into similar issues communicating across borders, whether that's cultural differences across states, urban/rural divides, regional accents, or across countries (US/UK/Australia/South Africa/India, etc.)
I don't think the article presented enough evidence to support the headline that "native English speakers are the worst communicators". It's less about English vs any mother tongue being worse or better; rather, bilingualism has numerous benefits (intercultural communications being one of them), but many in the Anglosphere are not bilingual (because they're not forced to be, unlike people who have to learn English as a second language): https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21428634-000-oh-to-be...
TLDR: Fluffy article, interesting underlying point
The claims made here are tied to the fact that English is more or less the primary language of international business. Its well known that people who learn secondary languages tend to know the "rules" around the language and tend to be more specific when using secondary languages.
Its pretty weird for the article to conflate using slang/abbreviations/language tied to cultural norms from a primary speaker as being unable to communicate.
Other languages have built in cultural connotations that pretty much only matter within their specific culture that doesn't really make sense outside of it.
Sure when knowingly speaking to a multicultural audience, its probably for the best to not use idioms and such, but the failures of communication is not tied to the fact that English is being used.
On a different note, we always jokingly use Dutch saying in English:
* Stop stabbing the dragon with me!
* Ah there comes the monkey out of the sleeve!
Ah, well, the more cultures, the merrier!
If you're from Portugal, and you speak English, you're mostly not using some local flavor Portuguese words or expressions or jokes because they wouldn't make sense in English. So you speak simply and you're easy to understand.
I do recall a colleague of mine who was trying to learn English. He said I was one of the more difficult english speakers he'd ever met. It was fun to try to reel that in to be more clear. Eventually I just directed him to the urban dictionary.
I think it might be because of its lack of real grammatical topic, which is otherwise ubiquitous and often more important than the subject.
Not that I'm blaming the language, just think it's curious at how many conflicting and skewed rules have just become a part of the language over hundreds of years.
I once was trying to contact an engineer that had worked on a project before me. Their last name in git was just "R". After some searching and asking another colleague I found out that this is a special last name that is abbreviated that way.
The article makes this claim, but doesn't substantiate it. The content of the article has nothing to do with a comparative study on communication. Always disappointing to see clickbait from the BBC.
I suggest the title be changed to something like Native English speaker are generally bad at tuning into language variation.
edit I see NikolaeVarius beat me to it.
They may get more opportunities to make that mistake, since (a) they're often monolingual, and (b) they're more likely to be speaking to a non-native speaker (what with English being the international language these days). But it's not inherent to either the language or the speakers.
English is a very flexible and expressive language, but those features aren't what you want to use for precise communication.
https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2015/06/whats_the_most...
I wonder which you think is a more precise language than English? As a monoglot, I can't comment.
To say that "native English speakers are the world's worst communicators" is quite a bold claim. Personally, I'd give that title to native French speakers.
"Personally, I'd give that title to middlemanagers who were promoted beyond their abilities."
I heard an Englishman quip that English is the only language where you can tell a person's class by their accent. Or a lot of people think English is the hardest language to learn because of its irregularities or terrible spelling rules. Or that our slang is somehow exceptional. Most of these people don't have enough experience in other languages to have any idea how they compare to English.
I'm a native English speaker with French as my second language. In my experience "Business French" doesn't have nearly as many problems as English.
This is one of numerous "faux-amis" that are so tricky for native French speakers. While "fameux" has the meaning an English speaker would expect, "Infâme" means odious. Other examples include "éventuellement" that means possibly (and not surely in the future), "actuellement" which translates as "nowadays" (and not really) etc.
It may be chauvinism, but etymological and geographical clues let be believe that most of these are french words that have been imported into English and whose meanings changed radically. Admittedly, some probably share a common latin origin and were declined into similar words but retaining a different subset of their original meanings.
It is often a source of weird misunderstandings between native French and English speakers, neither of which are famous for their mastery at learning foreign languages...
It seemed somewhat plausible or serious to me because "ultimate" is slang for "really cool" in India. (At least it was when I was growing up; who knows what the cool kids there say these days.) But I was puzzled because I've spent the majority of my adult life in North America, and never heard "penultimate" used that way.
> The word penultimate as a slang word seems to have worked its way into common parlance thanks to the slang use of the word ultimate. As a slang term, ultimate means cool rather than last. So the hipster logic may have concluded that if ultimate means cool, then penultimate must mean super cool.
https://minnesota.publicradio.org/radio/podcasts/grammar_gra...
I assumed the parent was making a joke that something like this would be the case. Turns out it really is. "Never underestimate the stupidity of..."
But with respect to the one word financial loss, it sounds like the receiver is ultimately to blame because they chose to act without confirming the meaning of the original message.
Sure, the writer could have considered the ambiguity and been more specific or explicit, but the receiver made a choice and ran with it.
Why does this article make me think the problem is perhaps mainly with those native English speakers who haven't been exposed much to their own language as it's spoken in the regions?
- highly industry-specific
- has two contradictory definitions in some dictionary
- possibly identifying a multinational company
And you can use a compliment like "Muy bien. Te feliciiito." ("Very good. I congratulate you." But with a long ee sound in the middle of the last word) And it means something like "You are an idiot" / "You made a big mistake".
I thought to myself, that has to be a Brit, but admittedly I'm not familiar enough with the way various native speakers of English use the language to know for sure. To us furriners, it can sure be a bit confusing some times :)
Isn’t this a description of native vs non-native speakers in many languages?
I'd venture to guess, that only with English you can find businesses that run in English but native speakers are a minority in the company.
Actually, there's some Japanese companies that try to use English in the office even if they don't have any foreigners.
* in the ballpark of (around)
* touch base (have a short chat for mutual understanding of something)
* dropped the ball (fucked up on something you are responsible for)
* heavy hitter (the one that brings a lot of cash, etc.)
https://web.uri.edu/iaics/files/M.-LAKHWANI-R.-CLAIR.pdf
I think most languages and cultures have conceptual shortcuts. Every culture/language has their “Shaka, when the walls fell” from Star Trek (here I go with the conceptual shortcuts).
Which languages and in which contexts?
You won't find things like this in a grammar book, it's kid of more like what bitrate the language aims for.
Not necessarily. The key idea from the article in the phrase "specific to their own culture". There isn't one English in the world. There are now many versions which are bound to cultures and differ in the idioms and sayings used. Think about all of the sports based sayings and metaphors you are used to. Many of them won't mean much to English speakers in other countries.
Either way, communicating with people from other cultures, even when using the same language, remains a sticky wicket.
In my native language we use declension everywhere. I could awkwardly say the same in my language, something like "olyžicujte ma" (o=equip/cover, lyžica=spoon, ujte=keep doing something, me=ma) - it is technically correct, but english didn't need to change any of those words, it just worked. English can convey the same meaning without unnecessary complexity.
I like this simplicity in language, it feels somehow superior. Simpler is better.
“Spoon” as a verb usually means something like “cuddle me” - as in “let’s be like spoons and fit all our curves really close together”.
It seems like the “o” in “olyžicujte ma” clarified that you’re talking about equipping.
I haven’t seen the show, but that double entendre on “spoon” might have been one layer of the joke.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytic_language
In analytic languages, speakers use word order and additional words to convey relationships. However, this does not mean that analytic languages are simpler, it just means that the complexity is different.
For example, English usually requires that you use the correct word order, correct articles, and correct prepositions. "A customer is angry about the movie." You cannot change word order. You must use the correct article ("a" customer, "the" movie), and correct preposition ("angry about", not "angry at"). In some other languages, these details like "a" / "the" are not important.
Sentences like "Spoon me" or "beer me" rely on the fact that English uses word order instead of declension. The sentence must have a verb, and "me" is not a verb, so the word before "me" is treated as a verb. The words are simple and flexible, but the word order is very strict.
One of the major shocks for me was when I heard the story of someone who broke a leg, and stopped a friend from calling an ambulance because it'd be too expensive and instead called a taxi to get to the hospital. A combination of me being younger and naive, and not knowing the US so well back then, so I literally thought they were joking while they were telling it.
> I'm hungry. Would you like to get lunch and continue discussing this as we eat?
Good clear statement, motivation, question, and proposed action. But there's some repetition. If I'm the one suggesting lunch, it can be assumed that I am hungry, so that doesn't need to be mentioned.
> Would you like to get lunch and continue discussing this as we eat?
Now we add in some cultural context, that people generally eat lunch around noon, and that it is generally a social affair. Asking if somebody wants to get lunch implicitly includes the question of having lunch as a group.
> Would you like to get lunch?
In the same manner, rather than asking about the intended action of "having lunch", one can instead ask about previous actions, with the assumption that somebody will join in on a social activity.
> Have you eaten yet?
Depending on the level of formality, both the choice of words and the level of diction can be chosen to progressively shorten the phrase.
> Did you eat yet?
> Didja eat yet?
> Djeet yet?
The last one, when spoken and in the context of a co-worker asking shortly before noon, is understandable as a social request by a native speaker with a similar accent, even though it's missing over half of the syllables needed to even be grammatically correct.
1. At one time in human history, not long ago, it was mandatory to have some facility in at least a 2nd language to claim you had a higher education. Partial mastery of a 2nd language would help native English speakers "get" what it's like for the non-native people and might help them adjust there speaking style. IMHO we have allowed "higher" education in English speaking countries to devolve in this regard.
2. We might be entering an era where English begins to morph into new dialects as did Latin when it was the "Lingua Franca" of the time. The 2nd language population will overwhelm the native English speakers and so control the language.
( "Lingua Franca" is probably one of those terms that one should not use internationally, unless you are in Italy, Spain, France, Portugal or Romania) :)
I'm not sure what you mean. Are you perhaps confusing lingua franca with romance language?
[1] https://www.dictionary.com/browse/lingua-franca
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English-based_pidgins
Admittedly, using a latin expression literally describing French to mean English may be slightly confusing...
To be dishonestly picky, French is somehow etymologically the "language of the Franks"... However, from what I just read, while "lingua franca" designates a vehicular language (which is the main thing to remember about the expression), it was originally used to refer to a simplified mix of languages (Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, French among others).
Thanks again, I guess I made long ago a lazy intellectual shortcut conflating my somehow credible explanation with the actual origin of the expression.
IMO if you get an ambiguous phrase in any language, ask for clarification. Especially if it's work related.
What's more annoying is the cultural differences, mainly anglo saxons always being in a hurry and almost never considering the long term consequences.
My wife has been showing me Twogether, a show about two celebrities from different countries whose only common language is English, and who are made to travel and perform tasks together in countries whose languages they don't speak.
It's fascinating to hear the version of English they speak to each other. It's not US or UK English, it's a combination of English, Korean, Chinese, intonation, facial expression, and gesture to communicate what they need in a given moment. It was odd for me to that they were actually able to use English to communicate with each other better than I, a native English speaker, could use to communicate with either of them. Built up context and the tendency of language to take the shape of its container resulted in a patois better suited to their purposes than the language I use every day, and in a business context, pretending this doesn't happen is a recipe for failure, I believe.
I was in a class with a Japanese instructor. I had a great deal of trouble understanding him. A hand was raised and a person began talking with a very different accent (Finnish) and I understood very little of that. The Japanese instructor understood the question and replied. I however understood almost nothing of the entire exchange. This may be the future for native English language speakers or perhaps is already the norm in some parts of the world.
Really all I'm doing is repeating what the non-native speaker said verbatim, but with an accent that the native speaker is more familiar with.