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Comment by incrudible | Hacker News Reader

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.

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I was going to follow up with a similar quip, but I think we're falling into old crypto-nationalistic stereotypes and maybe we should all try to be better, so...

"Personally, I'd give that title to middlemanagers who were promoted beyond their abilities."

I agree, it drives me nuts when I see bad hot takes on the English language by Anglophones. Articles in English about English are more often than not egocentric and short sighted.

I heard an Englishman quip that English is the only language where you can tell a person's class by their accent. Or a lot of people think English is the hardest language to learn because of its irregularities or terrible spelling rules. Or that our slang is somehow exceptional. Most of these people don't have enough experience in other languages to have any idea how they compare to English.

> 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.

I'm a native English speaker with French as my second language. In my experience "Business French" doesn't have nearly as many problems as English.

The statement "native English speakers are the world's worst communicators" is true because of the large number of English speakers in an international context, even when the average "badness" of an English speaker is no worse than of a French speaker.

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