By William R. Dodson
Three times more speakers of the Chinese language inhabit
the world than native English speakers. Yet through a combination of clever
planning and happenstance, English is the lingua franca of the business
cognoscenti. But linguistic hegemony won’t last long for monolingual
British and American managers. The center of gravity of the language of
business will shift from English to Chinese and Spanish — perhaps
even Hindi — with heavy English influences. Are you as an international
manager prepared for the change?
Barbara Walraff wrote in her article “What Global Language?”
that “English is not sweeping all before it, not even in the United
States.” She cites that “ever-wider swaths of Florida, California
and the Southwest are heavily Spanish speaking … Hispanic people
make up 30% of New York City,” with television stations that have
viewerships that outstrip English-only network affiliates. She goes on
to make the point that during the 1980’s the number of speakers of
Chinese grew by 98%, with … “four out of five preferring to
speak Chinese at home.”
The interests of immigrants around the world are different now from what
they were a hundred years ago: immigrants want to maintain their ethnic
and cultural identities, especially their languages. Immigrants from Asia,
Latin America and from North Africa do have a strong sense of wanting
to succeed in their adopted homelands; but the sense is just as strong
for them to honor their cultural and linguistic roots. They want enough
of what the West offers by way of “economies of scale” to make
life materially satisfying; however, fewer are willing to eschew their
language to obtain the prize. The emergence now of super-ghettos that
withstand the typical immigrant cycle of absorption into the mainstream
is creating vast enclaves within Western domains in which residents don’t
require English to succeed materially. This standing wave of stubborn
ethnicity now includes younger generations of immigrants, people born
on Western, post-industrial shores.
Just as many English words have crept into the vocabularies of dominant
immigrant populations (el clutch in Spanish; hen cool! — very cool!
— in Chinese), the transfusion is also working the other way. Native
English speakers will have to adapt to words and syntaxes that leap over
cultural barriers into the English language (fin de siecle, au naturel,
aficionado). And compared to languages such as Chinese and Hindi, English
is still a rather young and impressionable language. English will absorb
more than just the odd word here and there; its very grammar structures
will change, and the reverberations will resound throughout the English-speaking
world, native and non-native alike. For example, on one English-speaking
Website for citizens of India, the author was met on the home page with
a large billboard ad for phone cards that had one elderly man effusing,
“I am using this service for last many years!”
Ultimately, the center of linguistic gravity in the world is shifting
because the number of native English speakers in the industrialized world
is actually decreasing. John Derby writes in his article “The Future
of English: A mighty language and its prospects,” that by the end
of the century “…those peoples that speak English as their first
language will still do so, but their numbers will be slipping below 5
percent of the human race,” down from 9.8 percent in 1958. The reason
for the decline is two-fold: fewer people in the West are having babies;
and more people in developing countries are continuing to have larger
families than in the West.
The international manager whose native language is English can meet the
changing complexion of the language by engaging immigrants and foreign
nationals from developing countries. Ask questions about the use of the
English language in those countries, and listen intently to the way they
use the language. Tune in occasionally to television stations that support
Spanish-language, Chinese, Hindi or even Arab programming.
For each of the new words and grammar structures that the English language
absorbs and to which Westerners will need to adapt, there will be business
opportunities and products aplenty to buy and sell.
William R. Dodson is Managing Director of Silk Road
Communications, L.L.C., a management consultancy that builds and improves
working relationships across cultures. He is a contributing editor of
the American Management Association’s (AMA) MWorld Journal of Management,
and writes the weekly column "The Cultured Business", found
at www.silkrc.com.
He can be reached at wdodson@silkrc.com
or +1 (847)722-7817
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