Just throw your eyes over those job advertisements and you have a handy snapshot of the global communication challenge. „Ihre Englischkenntnisse sind gut.“ / „Verhandlungssicheres Englisch“ / „Sehr gute Englischkenntnisse runden Ihr Profil ab.“ Not only are we supposed to be „masters“ of the English language as spoken and written, but increasingly we are expected to demonstrate „Mehrsprachigkeit“. Just like James Bond, only we never see him in the language lab. This all-too-easy assumption of perfect English skills reminds me of a seminal play from the Theatre of the Absurd. The Romanian Francophone Eugène Ionesco tried learning English in 1948 using the Assimil method with a series of audio recordings. His experience of Anglais sans Peine was mirror-imaged in his debut farce „The Bald Soprano“, where the scene is set with perfect absurdity: „Mr Smith, an Englishman, seated in his English armchair and wearing English slippers, is smoking his English pipe and reading an English newspaper, near an English fire. He is wearing English spectacles and a small gray English mustache. Beside him, in another English armchair, Mrs Smith, an Englishwoman, is darning some English socks. A long moment of English silence.“ Mrs Smith kicks off the action with ridiculous text-book ease: „There, it’s nine o’clock. We’ve drunk the soup, and eaten the fish and chips, and the English salad. The children have drunk English water. We’ve eaten well this evening. That’s because we live in the suburbs of London and because our name is Smith.“ Sixty years later, with global usage of English quadrupling in the meantime, Ionesco’s vision of perfectly acquired English lunacy is close to realization. The world is increasingly full of English sentences which make perfect grammatical sense and no sense whatsoever as social statement. „It is strictly forbidden on our Black Forest camping site“, the directly translated German sign reads, „that people of different sex, for instance men and women, live together in one tent, unless they are married with each other for that purpose.“ In its explicit prohibition and definitive precision, this remains a perfect example of German-language behaviour dressed up in English vocabulary. Hermaphrodites aside, it also tells us a whole lot about English as a global tool. Much has been written about business etiquette – about stuffing that napkin under your collar before you tackle that lobster – and a sizable library has been produced on intercultural understanding. What you will search for far and wide is a guide to using English for business between cultures. This has two causes. The intercultural experts are (in the main) non-native speakers. The native speakers, meanwhile, remain walled off in blissful monolingual ignorance. Not so long ago, I saw two American pensioners waiting at Franz-Josef-Strauss Airport in Munich for their plane home. Baseball caps in place, they were counting out their left-over Euro change and calculating ways of disposing of it. As a perfectly modulated German voice of the female variety came over the intercom and spoke beautifully clear English, they both froze in mid-action to listen for any flight update. „You catch that, George?“ „Nope.“ „That’s the trouble with this place. Nobody speaks English.“ As I was saying, what’s missing is an inside-out English guide for multicultural business. Take a look at your trading partners. In order of highest volumes, that reads » France, the United States, the United Kingdom, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, Austria, Spain, Switzerland and China. Add Po-land, the Czech Republic, Sweden, Russia and Japan and you’ve got over 75% of Germany’s export business. Now subtract the German Sprachraum and the Anglosphere and you’ve got the complex third-language challenge: global English. Before we go any further, time for a little disclaimer: The intercultural picture is not only complex because you’ve got a lot of culture clubs but because globalization is quickening the pace of change. Chinese, for instance, is now the third biggest language in Canada – so global mobility and migration mean your customer and their host culture are no longer synonymous.
