[lg policy] The kudzu of global business languages

[Harold Schiffman]

The kudzu of global business languages

A call for companies to require English of all their employees seems
insensitive – and unnecessary.

By Ruth Walker / May 17, 2012


Massachusetts may be the quintessential "blue state." And Harvard
University may be the kind of institution the late Gov. George Wallace
of Alabama, long an opponent of the civil rights movement, had in mind
when his complaints about "pointy-headed intellectuals" put that
phrase into our language.

But from just up the road from me, at the Harvard Business School,
comes a proposal that sounds as if it would fit right in with the
nativist sentiments of those who want to make "English first" or
"English only" the law of the land.

In the May issue of the Harvard Business Review, Tsedal Neeley,
assistant professor of business administration at the B-school, calls
for companies everywhere to adopt English as their global business
standard.

"Global Business Speaks English," the title of her piece proclaims.
Its subtitle: "Why You Need a Language Strategy Now." She makes clear
that by "a language strategy" she means a policy of mandating English
as the common corporate language, even within, "for instance … a
French company focused on domestic customers."

She starts with an obvious point: "More and more multinational
companies are mandating English as the common corporate language,"
among them Airbus, Daimler-Chrysler, Nokia, Renault, Samsung,
Technicolor, and Microsoft in Beijing.

>>From there, however, she goes to the idea of requiring something that
is to a large degree happening naturally anyway. The illustration
accompanying the article, by the way, is of a stylized meat grinder,
from which stylized figures (em-ployees?) drawn in the manner of Keith
Haring emerge. Go figure.

Although her online bio is light on actual biographical detail, it's
obvious that Ms. Neeley is not an aging angry white male afraid that
Maria and Julio are crowding him out of the job market. Her bio does
say she speaks four languages, without saying which the other three
are (she's obviously got English nailed). Nor does the bio indicate
the order in which she learned them.

In promoting the idea of English as a "lingua franca," she seems
unaware that wars have been fought over this kind of thing. Language
equals culture equals identity, "who I am" and "what my place in the
world is." Not everybody cooks the foods or plays the music or recites
the poetry of his or her authentic culture, but just about everyone
has a mother tongue to speak.

Neeley concedes, "Many global em-ployees fear that an English-only
policy will strip them of their cultural heritage. I propose an
alternative point of view." She sees learning English as a way for
representatives of other cultures to communicate better and thus get
their "brand" out into the workplace, and hence the larger marketplace
of ideas.

Mandates aside, it's worth noting that English has a knack for taking
root everywhere. English has been disseminated by Britain's colonial
past and America's cultural presence. Johnson, the language blog at
The Economist, likens English to "a weed."

I'd go one better: English is like kudzu. Kudzu is a climbing and
trailing vine, native to Japan and China and first brought to the
United States to landscape the Japanese Pavilion at the Philadelphia
Centennial Exposition in 1876. Kudzu is now found in much of the
southeastern US, and continues to spread through the rural landscape,
along power lines and over decrepit buildings and the like – although
in the case of the old shacks, perhaps not quite fast enough.

http://www.csmonitor.com/The-Culture/Verbal-Energy/2012/0517/The-kudzu-of-global-business-languages

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