STANLEY VAN HORN
In his perceptive and influential study, the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski (1884–1942) described the Trobriand Islanders in a way perhaps apt for human kind as a whole: “The whole of tribal life is permeated by a constant give and take” (Malinowski 1922: 167). Give and take in commerce is critical to survival, success, and enrichment, and, for many, English plays an increasing role in it. At the same time, language itself is a symbolic good with its own principles of give and take.
English is identified, however much in reality or in myth, as “the” language of worldwide commerce of the twenty‐first century – with an attending implicit model of a single international standard. More or less well meaning and more or less profitably, English language textbooks for business prescribe “best practice.” In doing so, they frequently subscribe to a single native‐speaker recipe for linguistic success, which B. Kachru has termed a “nativist mono‐model” of English – standing in contradistinction to a “functionalist polymodel” of world Englishes (1990: 7). Studies in world Englishes differ from prescriptivist models of English in aiming to account for multilinguals’ creativity within a linguistic repertoire and within a plural sociolinguistic context, (B. Kachru 1986a, 1986b, 1986/1990, 1990, 1992a, 1992b, 2005; Bolton 2004).
The functions of English and Englishes in the world marketplace are many: in consumer‐oriented discourses such as advertising (T. Bhatia 2006; Martin 2002), in market and retail or institutional service encounters (Clark & Pinch 1994; Ventola 1987), in daily talk at the workplace at various societal levels (Clyne 1994), and in various forms of talk which are the realm of business people and constitute professional identity (Bargiela‐Chiappinini & Harris 1997b; Holmes, Stubbe, & Vine 1999).
The sociolinguistic literature on professional discourse in English which has emerged in the last two decades is largely made up of cross‐cultural studies, in which data is collected from separate languages and communities and compared (Bargiela‐Chiappini & Harris 1997b; Hampden‐Turner & Trompenaars 1993; Yamada 1992, 1996, 1997; Yli‐Jokipii 1994, 1998; many papers in Bargiela‐Chiappini & Nickerson 1999; Bargiela‐Chiappini & Harris 1997a) and of intercultural studies, in which data is collected from the coming together of members of separate languages and cultures (Clyne 1994; Firth 1990, 1991, 1995a, 1995b, 1996; Garcez 1993; Gumperz 1992; Marriott 1995). The advantages of cross‐cultural and intercultural studies are that the sociolinguistic processes at work in professional discourse are made more explicit through comparison. Such work forms an important platform for beginning to describe and explain the contexts, repertoires, and creativity in English in business.
The risks in cross‐cultural and intercultural comparative work, however, are that units of analysis may be culturally biased, that descriptions of linguistic products and activities may or may not be suitable for comparison, and that linguistic actors may appear as stereotypes. Potential shortcomings, such as the danger of undernoticing non‐Western cultural contexts and language patterns, have been discussed by Y. Kachru (1992, 1996, 1997; Y. Kachru & Nelson 2006). Important caveats in doing contrastive discourse work, with specific reference to professional discourse, have similarly been noted by Scollon & Scollon (2001). Early, pioneering work in cross‐cultural pragmatics (e.g. Blum‐Kulka, House, & Kasper 1989) showed some degree of sensitivity to notions of sociolinguistic context in comparing speech acts (such as apologies and requests), and some later work in this area has begun to examine linguistic and cultural aspects of context in conversation (Kasper 2001). The inaugural issue of the journal Intercultural Pragmatics (2004) addresses a variety of theoretical issues in this field of study. While these concerns are not always or often brought specifically to bear on business genres, they are essential to balanced comparisons of Englishes in business.
This survey of world Englishes and global commerce may read as something of a double‐edged research agenda. On the one hand, there has been limited recent work on Outer and Expanding Circle varieties of Englishes in commercial and professional domains of use, and so the epistemologically distinct intercultural and cross‐cultural studies on professional discourse may stamp out territory for expanding the empirical and theoretical framework of world Englishes. On the other hand, cross‐cultural and intercultural studies rarely devote serious attention to multilingual creativity in either intranational or international arenas. A dialog between the world Englishes framework and this growing literature on professional discourse will serve the greater understanding of the pluricentric evolution and uses of English in business.
Notwithstanding the global consumption of business English tests and courses and textbooks, there has been only modest growth in empirical research on the uses of English in commerce worldwide. A main barrier to research in business discourse is the proprietary and private nature of, and therefore restricted access to, writing and speaking inside corporations. A significant exception to this trend has been a burst of research activity on professional discourse in Europe since the 1990s, an indication of interest in (and funding for) research on language in business contexts, alongside a willingness of some European firms to grant access to linguists for research. Studies in various global regions and general resources on Englishes and business are surveyed here.
Because of the vitality and importance of Asia in global commerce, the use of English in business in Japan, Korea, China, South Asia, and Southeast Asia is a source of comment and curiosity – but is less often the subject of peer‐reviewed research. Scholarly journals focusing on uses of English in this region such as Asian Englishes: An International Journal of the Sociolinguistics of English in Asia/Pacific (established in 1998) and the Journal of Asian Pacific Communication (established in 1990) have not yet seen business contexts as a main focus. A general picture of how English is used within and between corporations and between corporations and consumers is yet to emerge.
Japan has long been the focus of cross‐cultural and intercultural studies, probably because of longstanding western trade interests there and educational ties to the United States and Australia. Connor (1988) examines exchanges of letters in English between American and Japanese business partners. Morrow (1995) discusses language training within a Japanese corporation. Marriott (1997) discusses intercultural meetings and negotiation between Australians and Japanese. Yamada (1992, 1996, 1997) extensively analyses Japanese business meetings in comparison to American business meetings. Jones (1995) similarly discusses negotiation in Japanese meetings. Yotsukura (2003) describes Japanese business telephone interactions, with a view to applying concepts cross‐culturally. Relatively absent are world Englishes studies on the use of English in Japanese business, aside from advertising strategies, which have been broadly documented (Stanlaw 2004).
English is an important language of corporate business in South Asia and often the preferred language of international business. The Japan‐India Business Cooperation Committee has noted that Indian information technology specialists push for wider acceptance of English in contracts and daily work despite pressure to use more Japanese in working with Japanese clients. Academic studies of such contexts are severely limited; most research has been conducted in public domains.
Early work by John Gumperz in the 1970s and 1980s (revisited in Gumperz 1992) examined intercultural gate‐keeping encounters and service encounters between South Asians and Britons. V. Bhatia (1996) more recently outlines the nativization of job applications within South Asia. T. Bhatia examines English and language mixing in rural advertising (2000, 2006). Hartford and Mahboob (2004) examine letters of complaint and general complaints in letters to the editor in South Asian varieties of English and in Urdu.
Grundy (1998) examines parallel memos in Chinese and English in a Hong Kong bank. Bilbow (1997) compares Hong Kong Chinese and British employees in impression management strategies in requesting and giving directives. Pang, Xhou, and Fu (2002) present a survey of attitudes toward English as China is joining the World Trade Organization. In the Singaporean context, Chew (1997) examines cultural difference and problematic participation in job interviews.
In the Malaysian context, Gill (1999) and Nair‐Venugopal (2000a, 2000b, 2003) outline discourse practices and varietal features of Malaysian English in the workplace. Nair‐Venugopal (2000a) is the only monograph in a world Englishes framework on discourse in business. This volume includes discussion of lexical choices, style shifting, local forms of linguistic accommodation, and code choice/mixing including English in the professional workplace in Malaysia.
While research on varieties of English in Korea and in Southeast Asia outside Malaysia has seen some recent attention on the whole, research on English in commerce is not widely available. One study of Korean business letters in English is Park, Dillon, and Mitchell (1998).
In the European context, there is a notable spike in interest in the use of English as language of wider communication in business, both within and across national borders, which is perhaps in part attributable to the expansion of and developments in the European Union. A few studies describe intranational uses of English for business, in the Netherlands (Nickerson 1999a, 2000; Van Nus 1999) and Finland (Louhiala‐Salminen 1996).
At the same time, there is broad interest in cross‐cultural and cross‐linguistic comparisons. Yli‐Jokipii (1994, 1998) provides a detailed cross‐linguistic analysis of British, American, and Finnish business letters. Bargiela‐Chiappini (1999) compares the business culture of Italy and the UK as expressed in human resources trade magazines. Bargiela‐Chiappini and Harris (1997b) provide a monograph‐length cross‐cultural comparison of business meetings in the UK and Italy. Gavioli (1997) contrasts Italian service encounters with British ones.
These studies exist alongside many other cross‐cultural comparisons of Spanish‐Danish, Norwegian‐German, etc. Work on central and eastern Europe is yet to develop.
A main source of data on Englishes in Latin America is Friedrich and Berns (2003). Papers on language in business schools in Argentina (Friedrich 2003) and in commerce and advertising in Ecuador (Alm 2003) appear there.
Research on English in Brazil shows a variety of interests: analyses of meetings (Pérez de Souza e Silva 1994), advertising (Friedrich 2002), and intercultural negotiation (Garcez 1993), and a survey of the use of English in various spoken and written genres (Barbara, Celiani, Collins, & Scott 1996).
In the Middle East, English teaching materials for commercial areas such as banking and finance are common. One well‐illustrated analysis of business letter writing in English in the Middle East is Al‐Khatib (2001). Other studies include examination of data on code‐switching in the United Arab Emirates (Khuwaileh 2003) and the use of English by business students in Kuwait (Dehrab 2002).
Among studies of language and business in Africa are an analysis of workplace lexicon in Nigeria (Alabi 2000), language choice and use in the engineering workplace in South Africa (Hill & Van Zyl 2002), and complaint and application letters in Cameroon (Nkemleke 2004).
One study of English in advertising in Oceania is Romaine’s (1997) discussion of Pidgin English advertising in New Guinea. In New Zealand and Australia, studies of workplace English for immigrant workers are a main focus for language and business (e.g. Brown & Lewis 2003 for New Zealand; Clyne 1994 for Australia).
In addition to published research on Englishes in global commerce, there are international conferences and organizations that focus on language and business. The Association for Business Communication (www.businesscommunication.org), established in 1935, has regional conferences in North America, Asia, and Europe and publishes two journals, the Journal of Business Communication (with a theoretical focus), and Business Communication Quarterly (with a pedagogical focus). An additional journal is the Journal of Language for International Business (Thunderbird, the Garvin School of International Management in Arizona, USA).
A younger European conference is the Languages and Business Conference on Languages and International Business Communication (www.sprachen‐beruf.com). Other associations and journals with focus on language and applied linguistics which do not focus on business and commerce in themselves but which may have papers of interest to business include the journal English for Specific Purposes (Elsevier); the journal World Englishes (Wiley, formerly Blackwell); the meetings of the International Association for World Englishes (IAWE); the International Association of Applied Linguistics (AILA); and its North American affiliate, the American Association of Applied Linguistics (AAAL).
A nontrivial concern for a “socially realistic linguistics” (B. Kachru 1981) is the carefully drawn interrelationships between language, contexts of situation, and context of culture. An understanding of the language in contexts of commerce requires an investigation of ways in which varieties of language create, reflect, and reproduce cultural systems.
Business professionals are deeply interested in cultural points of view and may be willing to pay for consultants or at least for advice in mass‐market books, in order to feel more confident about making a deal in another land. Of some influence have been the business and culture theories of Hall (outlined in Campbell 1998), Hofstede (1980, 2001), Hampden‐Turner and Trompenaars (1993, 2000), and Trompenaars (1994). These culture theories are largely based on psychological and sociological questionnaires. Hampden‐Turner and Trompenaars elicited responses to various business “dilemmas” to test the values of business people in different countries. With provocative concepts like “How to create wealth from conflicting values” (Hampden‐Turner & Trompenaars 2000), cultural differences are presented as exploitable assets for all.
The question arises: to what extent, if any, are the supposed cultural principles present in a way that can be shown empirically to operate in linguistic interaction? A number of studies attempt to make the connection between culture and language behavior. Niemeier, Campbell, and Dirven (1998) and Bargiela‐Chiappini and Harris (1997a) attempt to relate a cultural concept with linguistic variation in business contexts. For example, Grundy (1998) examines Confucian values and how they play out in a memo in Chinese in a Hong Kong firm in contrast to a parallel memo in English. Mulholland (1997) draws on folk perceptions of Korean difference and identity (such as the business “warrior”) in her discussion of business interaction between Koreans and English speakers. Both of these sample studies attempt to relate national or regional culture to linguistic practice in business.
A few studies attempt to identify sociolinguistic behaviors of narrower business cultures. Bargiela‐Chiappini (1999) uses a sort of register analysis to identify operative categories in human resources trade journals in Italy and the UK. Pogner (1999) examines different national norms toward the amount of specification and audience‐design required in technical engineering documents as they line up with bureaucratic practices and industry relations.
A few studies address the slippery notion of “corporate culture” in multinational corporations (Nickerson 2000; Louhiala‐Salminen 2002) and suggest that, for some routine interactions, corporate culture is significant in socializing employees into local norms for formality or informality in interactions, and that the national and ethnic origins of the employees play a lesser role in communicative patterns within the multinationals.
Constructs of national business cultures and national business styles must be examined critically in a situated linguistics analysis. If they even exist, they may prove not to play into a particular context at all. Work on business communication and culture must move beyond correlational hypotheses and come to a thoroughgoing analysis of text and context.
Sociolinguistic work on business writing draws mainly from the resources of register and genre analysis. Genre analysis assembles insights from register analysis in relating functions of text to context and superimposes a set of relations among sociocultural categories and rhetorical and interactional moves within a text. Genre analysis highlights the importance of rhetorical purposes and discourse community in attributing meaning to text. Swales (1981, 1986, 1990) is generally recognized as a main proponent of this incarnation of theory of text and context. V. Bhatia (1993) continued to develop this framework and has extended the application of genre analysis to examination of varieties of English (1997, 2006). For an overview of register analysis and genre analysis, see Yunick (1997).
In genre analysis, the notion of discourse community is central, as members of a discourse community have a largely shared set of norms for language use and interpretation. Through socialization, the discourse community provides norms for the application of strategies and for constraints in a culturally defined type of language production. In examining text, genre analysis aims to explicate purposes achieved through strategic choices of moves, and how the moves themselves are built up by strategic lexicogrammatical choices. A potential pitfall in carrying out genre analysis is that discourse communities may be assumed to exist where they have not been demonstrated to exist, thereby imputing norms in recipe fashion to various communities to which they might not apply. For example, a variety of English language learner corpora have been assembled in world regions such as Europe and Southeast Asia. These are sometimes taken to provide evidence of user norms without explicit attention to how users are, or are not, connected in discourse communities. When varieties and genres are defined in such a fashion, they may be hollow constructs where meanings are not situated in communities. Genre analysis has nonetheless provided a productive starting point for research.
V. Bhatia’s 1993 monograph details a genre of promotional (sales) letters and inspired a large number of genre analyses. Several works on promotional letters (Van Nus 1999), request letters (Yli‐Jokipii 1994, 1998), faxes (Akar & Louhiala‐Salminen 1999), and eventually e‐mail (Gimenez 2000; Mulholland 1999; Nickerson 1999a) emerged. More complex and embedded genres, such as bids (Barbara & Scott 1999), letters of negotiation (Pinto dos Santos 2002), and bureaucratic technical documents (Pogner 1999) have also been described.
As business correspondence is transactional and interpersonal, and as many of its rhetorical moves correspond to speech acts (apologies, requests, etc.), analyses such as those of Nickerson (1999b, 2000) and Yli‐Jokipii (1994, 1998) also draw on politeness theory (Brown & Levinson 1987) as an added textual‐analysis tool. They analyze, for example, how social distance and relative imposition affect the variety and combination of politeness strategies (mitigators, “off record expressions,” etc.) in letters.
In a cross‐cultural comparison of American, British, and Finnish letters of request, Yli‐Jokipii (1994, 1998) outlines how the distinct grammatical resources of Finnish and English work differently in terms of face maintenance. Yli‐Jokipii also observes that there generally appears to be a smaller amount of register variation in Finnish request letters when compared to those in English (and also in British when compared to American).
These analyses point to the essential work of examining and integrating the layers of language from lexicogrammatical resources to discourse strategies, in order to achieve a balanced interpretation of something so relatively simple as a business letter. Y. Kachru (1992: 239) also provides a reminder that speech act theories and politeness sometimes fall short of accounting for verbal interaction, and ethnography of communication may at times be needed for a complete picture. Business letters, while not poetry, are fundamentally creative, and their interpretation cannot necessarily be taken for granted if resources and strategies are not shared.
The recognition of specific cultural patterning of lexicogrammatical and discourse resources has long been noted in a world Englishes framework. For example, the resources of English may be patterned with South Asian politeness strategies to achieve a “high prose” style of letter writing that contrasts significantly with Inner Circle letters. In terms of the intercultural impact, Y. Kachru (1996: 190) notes that “adverse reactions to [the South Asian ‘high’ prose style] are well documented” and remarks that reactions to US/UK letters within South Asia may be similarly adverse.
A further research question is to what extent and in what domains the high prose style continues to operate in South Asia. It is perhaps unlikely that it is used to create professional identity in memos and e‐mail messages in an IT or marketing firm. An empirically based update on business writing in South Asia might be revealing of the evolution of English and of the linguistic exponents of a South Asian “professional identity” as put forth in writing. V. Bhatia’s (1996) description of the nativization of job applications and Hartford and Mahboob’s (2004) description of letters of complaint in South Asia are two such investigations in that direction.
Works of genre analysis, cross‐culturally, cross‐linguistically and in specific varieties of English, have begun to spell out important textual and contextual dimensions in business writing. V. Bhatia (1997) draws attention to the creative power of genres, in the ability to flout the conventions and mix generic features, and to the politics of genres’ inclusive and exclusive functions. Genre analysis may be used an interpretive tool for understanding variation (as in V. Bhatia 2004, and 2006 with respect to film reviews), including variation across varieties of Englishes.
Meetings and negotiations are two types of spoken language vital to commerce: meetings are central to meaning‐making and relationship‐maintenance, and negotiations are vital in producing change that may mean growth and profit.
Bargiela‐Chiappini and Harris (1997b: 7) assert that “meetings are the essence of many if not most organizations; in fact, one could argue that they are the organizations themselves” (emphasis original). Meetings as a form of social encounter have sometimes been of interest to conversation and discourse analysts (Cuff & Sharrock 1985) and are a prime location for the investigation of an internal “corporate culture” and of how national cultures and Englishes play into the construction of that corporate culture.
Bargiela‐Chiappini and Harris (1997b) detail the organization and social structures which emerge in a series of Italian and British business meetings in a British‐Italian venture, and compare them cross‐culturally. They found that the two groups were much more similar than different, although thematic progression and topic management seemed to be slightly more distributed in the British meetings than in the Italian meetings. They discuss other cross‐cultural (and, through interview data, intercultural) observations more informally.
Yamada (1992, 1996, 1997) analyzes the distribution of topic and turns in Japanese meetings and compares them with meetings in US settings. Among Yamada’s cross‐cultural findings are that: turns are more evenly distributed in number in Japanese meetings; American meetings are more agenda driven; Japanese meetings have an initial sounding‐out phase which is lacking in American meetings.
Within business contexts, “negotiation” may have a variety of meanings, from simply trying to get a desired something to settling on terms to make a deal. For an attempted definition of negotiation in discourse, see Wagner (1995). A school of European researchers has been generating research on negotiation for over a decade. Charles (Charles 1996; Lampi 1986)1 presents a two‐tiered model of business negotiation based on her research in the UK, analyzing how different discourse strategies are used at different phases of negotiation. Stalper (1992) analyzes cross‐cultural business phone negotiations, finding that business calls are more “matter of fact” than ordinary calls, in that repairs may not be carried out and that important topics may be resumed out of sequence without the normally requisite facework. Firth (1990, 1995a, 1995b, 1996) similarly analyzed intercultural business negotiations on the telephone and corroborated Stalper’s finding that repair sequences were often abandoned in the endeavor to get the work done. In 1995, two anthologies, Firth (1995c) and Ehlich and Wagner (1995), appeared, presenting a variety of additional work on negotiation in the European context.
Much of the work on negotiation takes on the advantages and the constraints of ethnomethodology and a conversation analysis methodology (see Markee 2000 for an overview). Ethnomethodology and conversation analysis aim to uncover organizing social categories in talk through scrutiny of the sequential organization. Practitioners of conversation analysis are strict in refusing to assign interpretation to talk other than that warranted by the sequential organization of turns.
These tools were brought from the realm of the study of everyday conversation to institutional discourses in law and medicine in the 1980s and early 1990s, and eventually to business and administrative realms. (See Geluykens & Pelsmaekers 1999 for a substantial bibliography of earlier work in professional discourses of a variety of types; for earlier references and typology, see Couture 1992.)
While a strict conversation analysis perspective has not yet been applied to negotiation encounters outside the European school or within a world Englishes framework, more broadly defined discourse analyses have been applied to world Englishes data, often focusing on code‐switching, code‐mixing, and style/lectal shifting in fictional (Y. Kachru 1989; Lee 2004; Osakwe 1999; Pandey 1995; Tawake 2003; Vaid 1980; Zhang 2003) and natural data (Banu & Sussex 2001; Bolton 2002; Bwenge 2003; Dako 2002; Jung & Min 1999; Kang 2003; Kouega 2003; Ngom 2002). So far, this work has not been extended to analysis of cultural discourses of business, with the notable exception of Nair‐Venugopal (2000a).
In the business realm, as elsewhere, the tension between cravings for a single standard exist alongside recognition of variety in language form and function. Bolton (2004), Brutt‐Griffler (2002), and others have identified “centripetal and centrifugal” forces at play in English and the tension between more apparently static concepts such as “World English” and more apparently dynamic ones such as “world Englishes.” In business practices, English use is increasing intranationally and internationally, and both forces of control and creativity are at work. The Englishes of business are of necessity global, local, and “glocal” (see T. Bhatia 2006 for a fleshing out of these terms).
In times of rapid technological and social change, cravings for a global standard are often voiced. Business texts and manuals (e.g. Lewicki, Saunders, & Minton 2004) are usually available to feed and fuel this desire. Multinational firms also put some value on a general standard for employees in business English skills by accepting or requiring documentation such as the Cambridge Business English Certificate (BEC). The BEC is offered in various locations worldwide, at British Council offices and elsewhere. BEC criteria below were excerpted from the website of the British Council in India in 2005:
BEC Preliminary
Prepares candidates to interact effectively while carrying out routine business transactions, for example speaking to clients over the telephone, writing brief letters, making appointments.BEC Vantage
Assesses how candidates can conduct and take part in meetings and teleconferences using skills of negotiation to put across a point of view. Ability to draft letters, memos, minutes of meetings and topics for presentation using appropriate business vocabulary and format.
BEC Higher
Assesses proficiency in the use of English for making presentations, negotiating effectively in the promotion of products and services, and in engaging in extended conversations with clients at meetings and seminars.
On the one hand, these BEC benchmarks are general enough to allow for varieties of English. On the other hand, some of the elements of even the Preliminary certificate (such as “speaking to clients over the telephone”) show potential for variation in politeness strategies within and across varieties. It is thus an open question whether the BEC has adopted a monomodel in order to evaluate, or whether it can still fill the need of business people for credentials while working within a polymodel of English.
Voices for centripetal forces of English, both descriptive and standards‐imposing, have been emerging from Europe in the last decade. Firth (1990, 1996) describes a de facto, functioning “lingua franca” English in Europe, which accomplishes linguistic interaction without some of the complete set of conversational inferencing strategies found in established varieties. Firth (1990) goes on to wonder whether there can exist such a thing as a pan‐cultural international negotiator. Seidlhofer (2001) also calls for a description of English as a lingua franca.
Brutt‐Griffler (2002) goes a step further, to posit a model where mother‐tongue varieties and macro‐acquisitional varieties (i.e. Outer and Expanding Circle varieties) begin to converge: World English. Brutt‐Griffler does not claim that a World English has arrived, only that it might arrive, a “domain in which national distinctions dissolve” (Brutt‐Griffler 2002: 181). This is a qualitatively different assertion from the question of pan‐national strategies for managing complexity and ambiguity in overlapping but not necessarily convergent systems. For the time being, there is no solid empirical evidence that a convergent standard, alongside multiple varieties, is on its way soon.
Some global executives would like to see one global norm for the ease of promotion and distribution of products. Sless (1999) examines the mass production of “personalized” letters. Global businesses would also be happy to be able to apply customer service telephone scripts worldwide, although Shaw et al. (2004) show that the reactions to telephone scripts vary to some degree cross‐culturally.
Some of the strongest voices in favor of standards come from technical disciplines and international organizations who operate under the assumption that a simpler language is a clearer language. Among industries that have standards for simplified language are maritime and aviation industries, which are concerned about potentially fatal consequences of miscommunication. A few studies representing these have appeared in World Englishes: Johnson (1999) and Sampson and Zhao (2003) on maritime communication and Tajima (2004) on aviation.
In the 1980s, the European aerospace industry developed Simplified English, loosely based on notions developed by semanticists I. A. Richards and C. K. Ogden’s Basic English (Ogden & Richards 1923; Richards 1943; Ogden 1930, 1931), with limited vocabulary and grammar and the enforcement of monosemy of words. Simplified English, along with data‐mining procedures to add lexical sets, has been used to generate basic manuals and instructions of various kinds. Varieties of simplified English have been proposed by those who would promote a universal brand of English, including Quirk’s (1981) Nuclear English, with its emphasis on simplified syntax.
Alongside these proponents of universals have been scholars who recognize and legitimate variation in language. A general response to these notions of universals appears in B. Kachru (1987, 1991, 2005). In contrast to the idea of a simplified word semantics, studies of varieties of English present patterns of lexical shift and innovation. Melchers and Shaw (2003) outline lexical variation in world Englishes and present tautonyms (same name, different meaning in different varieties) and heteronyms (different names in different varieties for one denotation). English in commerce, as in other domains, provides a context for examining the spread and evolution of English.
While the commercial desire for standards is great, the concurrent needs of serving and selling to consumers are another important force, in some ways centripetal and in some ways centrifugal. In global, regional, and local advertising and marketing, enormous amounts of money and time are invested in order to get the right message to reach customers through the creative (and manipulative) use of images, sound, and language, often with concurrent elements global and some highly particularized (T. Bhatia 2006; Martin 2002).
Alongside the need to maintain a consistent technical vocabulary and advertise, businesses also want to maintain a positive relationship with clients and customers and will consider adapting their service, and sometimes language, to meet clients’ needs. Linguistically, this may come in the form of symbolic accommodation. For example, the aerospace industry (particularly in Europe) uses a bureaucratic “incapacitated passenger” designation, borrowed from an old, legalistic maritime term. This designation is used on a form for passengers with medical needs, both to accommodate them and to evaluate whether they will be permitted to fly. However, in customer‐oriented documents, customers are told to contact the airline about “special needs” or “additional needs” or requiring “special assistance.” These terms exist alongside the more general “disability” and “disabled.” No one is called “incapacitated” outright in, for example, the USA.
A register analysis of 20 airline websites accessed in September 2004 showed an interesting distribution of these lexical items. A majority of airlines did tailor their homepages to customers by the use of “special needs,” “additional needs,” or “special assistance.” Among these airlines were United Airlines (USA), British Airways, Qantas (Australia), Swiss International Air, Singapore Airlines, Korean Airlines, and Thai Airways, and, with variations, Air Canada used “special services” and “service for people with disabilities.’
Air India had both a section for “special needs” and a statement about “incapacitated passengers” in the baggage allowance (wheelchair) section. Air France used “disabled travelers.” KLM (Netherlands) used “physically challenged passengers” and “disabled passengers.” Northwest (USA) used “customers with disabilities.” Other airlines did not use “needs” at all, and exclusively referred directly to “incapacitated passengers.” These included Malaysia Air, Air Philippines, Air Garuda (Indonesia), Tarom (Rumania), and Turkish Airlines.
In a highly coordinated endeavor such as the airline industry, competing needs have spawned parallel terms. These terms appear to have spread in different patterns to various organizations. Factors in varying diffusion could be multiple. Perhaps “incapacitated” was not viewed as face threatening in some places as it was in others. Perhaps, and quite likely, some places relied on computer‐assisted generation (such as with Simplified English) of their websites that uniformly insisted on the European technical term. And perhaps some airlines have not perceived a need to communicate the customer service function in English or have not appropriated the English customer service jargon, whether intentionally or not.
Commercial activity, even at its most coordinated, seems as likely to generate a plurality of terms along with its plurality of purposes, in this case technical versus customer service terms, as to encourage convergence. Companies at the same time show a great similarity in their customer service language. As regards expanding varieties of English, it is not clear in which ways industrial and commercial networks will or will not create shared norms.
Terminological differences and shifting purposes are expected in a world where things and concepts are constantly being created. Perhaps newer to the scene is that terminological banks, databases, templates, and simple algorithms may be used to generate documents for public consumption on the Internet.
While these documents do not exhibit ordinary linguistic creativity, their automated output might be accidentally exploited for human creative purposes. In the lexicon of world Englishes, an analysis of registers and genres of use in commercial activity may contribute to a broader understanding of shifting paradigms of meanings in word sets.
A polycentric model for English has not only theoretical but also ethical implications for language teaching and training. Early English for Specific Purposes (ESP) materials in the 1970s and 1980s commonly emphasized vocabulary development and correctness of expression in “English for banking,” “English for engineers,” “English for aviation,” and so on. B. Kachru (1986a, 2005) challenged the validity of teaching a monomodel of ESP, asserting that it was based on a faulty understanding of linguistic needs and was therefore an inappropriate and overly prescriptive pedagogy.
By the 1990s, however, the methodological tide turned toward task‐based language learning and apprenticeship models of language education for specific purposes. Practitioners of ESP have acknowledged the risk of teaching language skills which do not match real‐world requirements and have begun to encourage instructors to do ethnographic projects and organize courses that would engage learners in tasks which begin their socialization into professional practices (Boswood & Marriott 1994). Proponents of genre analysis in the teaching of reading and writing also present alternatives to mono‐model thinking and encourage learners to “destabilize” their notions of genre (Johns 2002). Other ESP practitioners have dedicated their careers to advocating that English language teacher training involve exposure to polymodels of English (Baumgardner & Brown 2003).
As the depth and range of English expands in various commercial contexts around the world, it is likely that the hunger for prescriptive mononorms will continue to resurface and that the temptation will arise to ignore and obscure the richness and variety of language practices in use. As the power and politics of English (Kachru 1986b) play out in the commercial sphere, there will surely be prescription‐texts which cater to the desire for norms, and at the same time there will also be teachers and trainers who promote creativity and awareness of varied contexts and discourses. The educational endeavor can only benefit from continued research on varieties of professional discourse and cultural ways of speaking and writing.