Native speakers are hard to understand in a lingua franca situation

All: please let's not react to the title, and certainly not just with an indignant reflex [1]. There's more interesting material here.

We've edited the title now to be more neutral and accurate, using representative language from the article.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

There is another aspect beyond raw vocabulary and grammar, and that's unspoken cultural assumptions :not abbreviations and slang, but real misunderstandings caused by different understandings of what seems to be a set of perfectly obvious sentences to both sides .

A branch of my company went through a merger with another branch in a different country, and with a different language. Needless to say, it was difficult, and people didn't all take it well. The interesting part was that both sides thought the other side was being actively hostile, and were brandishing emails as 'proof'.

I was eventually asked to do something to reconcile both sides of the new merged team, since I am a native speaker of both languages and understand both cultures. I read the emails, and was flabbergasted. Side A could read email from B as hostile, but side B had genuinely sent something they thought was perfectly ok, and I could see why. The other way round was the same. To be more specific, some cultures are far more direct than others, and what seems offensive to one is perfectly acceptable to the other. The other way round would be saying something 'forcefully' but very indirectly, and the other side understanding it as 'no' when it meant 'yes'.

I ended up solving the problem by organizing a very nice lunch, where everyone realized the 'others' were actually nice and friendly human beings, and that email was not always the best way to communicate.

This article blames English specifically for what is ultimately a cultural difference. This goes for a native speaker in any language.

I speak passable Spanish, and have encountered the same "cultural dissonance" when dealing with a native speaker in a room full of non-native speakers. When you grow up embedded in a language and culture, you don't realize when you slip into colloquialisms and culture references that don't translate well.

That whole business deal the article opens with is a joke. It's not the native speaker's fault, nor the word's fault. It was the recipient who picked randomly when faced with an unclear choice. If you're unclear, as for clarification. I worked with an international collaboration of scientists during college and that was one of things you learned quickly. No one has the same frame of reference you do, so make sure you're all on the same page. Hell, simply rephrasing your understanding in a reply before you take action can clear this up in a single message. "So you wanted us to X? Got it!". Then the other party has the opportunity to step in and say, "No, do Y".

I think some commenters are taking issue with this article for singling out English. Yes, the larger issue is native vs non-native speakers in any language. But this article is specifically addressed to native English speakers because English often serves as the common language in a room of mixed-language speakers.

I'm a native English speaker. I don't find the article offensive, and I appreciate it pointing out how I can be a more effective communicator.

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.

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.

Funnily enough I’ve had to explain this to my friends when ordering in Chinese or other ethic restaurants. Something like “hi, how are you? I’d like the roast duck with rice please, oh and with a Diet Coke too?” is actually quite confusing and a lot to parse when you’re a native Cantonese speaker rushing to serve 30 people. Instead “roast duck with rice, Diet Coke”, while rude sounding, is much preferable. It may seem a little condescending but learning to speak broken English is a rather useful skill.

This is somewhat off-topic, but as a native English speaker who has spent a lot of time conversing in English with non-native speakers, I've been struck by how many times non-native speakers will come up with a phrase that is perfectly proper English, but nothing a native speaker would ever have said, and quite poetic. It's often a charming surprise.

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.

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.

> 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?

I think the article touches on a few interesting points, but only at a fairly shallow.

What I have noticed working with various levels of bilinguals is that native vs non-native often have different misunderstandings.

A native person firing something off to another native will make too many assumptions. "I understand what 'it' is. No need to elaborate" is the feeling.

Non-natives tend to lean on a smaller set of vocabulary and grammar. This tends to serve them well in slower, written communication but can give them trouble in speaking when there is a miscommunication and they don't have the skills to correct it. Over- or under-applying a rule past it's breaking point. They also have to contend with false friends(words to be related across languages but actually have different meanings), which can sometimes cause very hard to spot miscommunications as both speaker and listener have separate but consistent ideas in their heads.

When it comes to accents, in general it can be considered rude to ask someone to modify their accent. I know that if I affect a general American accent I will be understood better, but should I?

The article echoes what General Jim Mattis commented on the topic of leadership in one of his interviews - (paraphrasing) decisions take an hour to make, the rest of the day is spent crafting the message to ensure there's no room for ambiguity or misunderstanding.

On the subject: I highly recommend "The culture map" book.

It provides a dozen of dimensions on communication and compares on real world examples how American, German, French, Chinese, Japanese and several other nationalities approach certain situations, and summarizes each dimension with a scale and puts each country in the left/middle/right.

https://erinmeyer.com/books/the-culture-map/

It talks things like "why X are so aggressive and direct" and "why Y are so $adjective".

I lived in France for 9 years and worked extensively with non-native speakers in English. My accent and word choice definitely shifted to a more international, neutral English at work. However if I started chatting 1:1 with a native speaker at lunch my speed and word choice would immediately shift and the other coworkers couldn't follow a damn thing.

I see this happening regurarily and i have to say that it heavily depends on the native speakers nationality.

Americans (at least if they don't speak some thick dialect) are easy to understand due to movies etc.

Brits are ok enough, but some dialects get tricky.

Irish and scottish usually are not understood by the absolute majority of participants. I pride myself in my ability to understand spoken english (relative to my peers here in germany at least) but even for me it is nearly impossible to understand an irishman talking over zoom etc. with some random headset.

I spent a semester in college in the Czech Republic with international students from all over Europe, all of whom spoke English. All the Americans learned to speak “European English” — slowed down, more verbose, without slang — because we were frequently told that we could not be understood otherwise. It became pronounced enough that people I would talk to back home would notice it. And for what it’s worth I couldn’t understand the students from the UK when they were speaking to each other either.

I think it may be more a "monolinguals are hard to understand in a lingua franca situation" issue. It just happens that a lot of English speakers are monolingual compared to speakers of most other languages.

When you learn a new language, particularly as an adult, you learn that you have limitations in its use and to be able to accept and work around them. You learn that that's nothing to be ashamed of, because you put in a hell of a lot of work and can now function in what used to sound like complete nonsense to you. You learn to prioritize keeping things short and simple to minimize the chance of your being miss understood.

In your native language, amongst native speakers, everyone's so skillful at communication that there's often more of a focus on how something is said than what is said. I.e. it's so clear that other speakers will understand a speaker's basic "I want to have this done by tomorrow" message - however they formulate it - that they often put more focus on other issues, such adding jokes or word-play, ensuring the correct level of politeness is used or communicating the nuisances of their current emotional situation. To other native speakers, that results in a richer signal, one containing more information which costs them no effort to understand and which they can filter out or pay attention to as they wish. To a non-native speaker, that additional information is just noise: like listening to a message over a bad radio signal. It costs them a lot of effort to attempt to understand it, they often fail in doing so and it gets in the way of their comprehendig the core message. They just want to hear "I need it by tomorrow morning", not "If it isn't too much trouble, is there any chance we could get this done by tomorrow?"

A monolingual can get this in the abstract, but it's easy for them to forget. Someone who's gone through the millions of minor embarrassments, humiliations and triumphs it takes to master a second language is far better disposed to remember it and act on it in practice.

Misused English words and expressions in EU publications [0]

> Over the years, the European institutions have developed a vocabulary that differs from that of any recognised form of English. It includes words that do not exist or are relatively unknown to native English speakers outside the EU institutions and often even to standard spellcheckers/grammar checkers (‘planification’, ‘to precise’ or ‘telematics’ for example) and words that are used with a meaning, often derived from other languages, that is not usually found in English dictionaries (‘coherent’ being a case in point).

[0] https://www.eca.europa.eu/Other%20publications/EN_TERMINOLOG...

I think there is a fundemental misattribution where the author talks about monolingual speakers.

Speaking to non-native speakers in a language is a seperate skill that can be learned without proficiency in a second language. It takes skill and care to keep your sentence structure simple and independent of semantic nuance or idiom.

People for whom English is a lingua franca have almost exclusively used English to speak to other non-native speakers and have lots of practice doing this.

Many years ago I had the chance to work in a research institute in Ireland.

A common line for newcomers who worried about their ability to speak was that we had 25 or 35 different nationalities, and the Irish were the only ones having problems communicating in English.

It is pretty obvious if you think about it, and not specific to any language: native speakers of X have to make an effort to speak "international basic X" and they are generally not used to do that.

As a non native speaker I struggle with this. I work with some native speakers which are more articulate, use a more complex sentence structure, speak faster and speak a lot longer. I often loose track of what they are saying and it is very hard to argue against them. I feel like a three year old.

I'm a native English speaker who ironically first encountered the use of English as a lingua franca when I moved to London for the first time. London turned out to be a much more cosmopolitan place than anywhere that I'd lived before and I'd say that around 50% of my colleagues at work were non-native English speakers, as were a similar percentage of the new friends that I made. I quite quickly learned to change the way that I spoke in order to be understood, and I learned that certain words that I'd used all my life were not even recognised internationally. The example that I remember vividly: a Polish colleague had to ask me why I kept saying "ta". Where my family comes from, "ta" is short for "thanks" and I had used it all my life without even thinking about it. It was one small example of the things that I had to try to un-learn in order to be understood in the more international environment that I found myself in.

As the article states, many English speakers are monolingual and probably have a hard time empathising with the struggles that non-native speakers can have with a language. I worry that the situation will only get worse. English is now spoken by so many people in so many places and the incentives (and opportunities) for English speakers to learn other languages are consequently increasingly small.

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.

Amusing anecdote.

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.

I'm interested in the minimal "Globish" subset of English this article mentions. It would be an interesting idea to have a variant of hemmingwayapp or grammarly that tries to automatically test if a bit of text conforms to it. This doesn't seem all that technically difficult, and would be the kind of thing some organizations would pay for if there's proof that it makes a bit of writing harder to misinterpret.

Misunderstandings like the "one word" issue cited at the beginning of the article are common among native speakers. I'm sure everyone has been to meetings where parties walked out the door having agreed to diametrically opposite things.

It is not necessarily a matter of English vs. non-English speakers but whether you have empathy with your audience. (Plus a bit of project management to ensure everyone understands decisions.)

> 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.

edit I see NikolaeVarius beat me to it.

So what was the word?? This is like those articles about photos that don't actually include the photo.

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.

Yes, I can definitely relate to this. English is not my native tongue. I’m acutely aware of the presence of other non-native speakers in the room and instinctively switch to simple terms and avoid the use of colloquialisms. Native speakers generally do not have that instinct.

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.

Esperantists have been pointing this out for over a century now. As others have noted, this isn't just a problem with English, but the choice of any national language as a lingua franca. If we choose Esperanto instead of English as our language for international communication, we are all second-language learners, and no one has the advantage of being the native speaker. Plus, since Esperanto has so few idioms, we'll all be better understood.

It doesn’t help that native English speakers are less inclined to learn another language and don’t get to understand the experience of being at the other end

Ismo, the comedian sums it up in great style[0] [1].

"I've got shit to do" means anything but actually going to the bathroom.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igh9iO5BxBo

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAGcDi0DRtU

Reminds me about how the EU has kinda created its own version of English loaning from the other European languages; Euro English [0]

[0] https://www.euronews.com/2020/04/23/world-language-day-do-yo...

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.

Two thoughts come to mind.

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) :)

Article seems to be selling the Globbish thing mentioned in the middle?

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.

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?

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.

> didn't reveal the tricky word because it is highly industry-specific and possibly identifiable

I suspect this article (or at this part of the article) is bs.

Non-native speakers know highly industry-specific words very well, because it is the words they are using every day. Moreover, industry-specific words in business correspondence rarely have double meaning unlike everyday words.

> Chia Suan Chong, a UK-based communications skills and intercultural trainer

likely made up this story to get some publicity, but could not find a good simple example.

Ah yes, less fluency makes for better communication, and more fluency makes for worse communication, but only for English speakers. There has got to be a meme in here somewhere.

is there any hard evidence of this or is this just from anecdotes?

I have my own anecdote - my swedish coworkers use more english slang and speaking shortcuts than many native speakers I know.

Teaching English to adults for three months here in Germany was excellent preparation for working with non-native English speakers. I learned how to aim my own word choices and pronunciation, how to extract meaning from garbled sentences, and how to find non-disruptive ways to rephrase things to confirm that I understood them the way the speaker intended and to help them confirm that they understood me correctly.

Accent is another sore point, I find understanding non-native speakers' accent to be way easier than understanding what some native speakers say.

Probably if you're a native speaker you've been exposed in your life to the different dialects and accents - as a non-native speaker the chances of you knowing how the different dialects influence words and pronunciation are much slimmer.

I'm German. I've had an Arabic colleague translate (=dumb down) my English to another German colleague. Vocabulary was the issue. "I think I spider."[1] It felt like having to rewrite a map-reduce to a loop in order to pass code review.

[1] http://ithinkispider.com/

Was the word “inflammable”?

Ya ain sayin mat'!

We English non-native speaker typically do not know colloquial English well. Another thing that was not taught to me is how important intonations, which are unwritten, are and how much natives rely on it.

The same happens in other languages, of course to a lesser degree.

I now know how to speak in very standard and slang free Spanish, very different to the Spanish I use with friends.

Is this another case of worse is better? Dammit.

(also funny that the title is native speakers are hard to understand in an honest language situation, I would say it's natural)

I grew up in India. I live in the U.S. now. I am a hostage to this situation and I am suffering from Stockholm syndrome.

Now I'm curious what the old title was.

>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.

This is a terrible title and a terrible article.

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.

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.

This probably should be rewritten as "Native language speakers are the world's worst communicators".

American English is to English as a Second Lanaguage as Typescript is to Javascript. We claim it is a superset, but the rules are different and it is unnecessarily verbose in all the wrong places.

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.

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.