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Comment by pbourke | Hacker News Reader

> 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?

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Yes. This is just another article trying to attack English by singling it out for scenarios that occur in every language. It's part of human communication and behavior, not a flaw inherent to English. Otherwise, what's the implication, that non-English speakers universally speak slowly and without any kind of idioms or color? That's disproven within a year of learning any new language

Well, there are a lot of Americanisms in business speak that just aren't frequent in international business that the unaware US speaker, for instance, will have difficulty expressing themselves without these colloquialisms or even being aware they are using them if they are not used to it. e.g. with baseball alone,

* in the ballpark of (around)

* touch base (have a short chat for mutual understanding of something)

* dropped the ball (fucked up on something you are responsible for)

* heavy hitter (the one that brings a lot of cash, etc.)

https://web.uri.edu/iaics/files/M.-LAKHWANI-R.-CLAIR.pdf

> Isn’t this a description of native vs non-native speakers in many languages?

I'd venture to guess, that only with English you can find businesses that run in English but native speakers are a minority in the company.

There's other cultures where most people don't natively speak the business language/dialect - not all Chinese speakers are native Mandarin for instance.

Actually, there's some Japanese companies that try to use English in the office even if they don't have any foreigners.

> Isn’t this a description of native vs non-native speakers in many languages?

Not necessarily. The key idea from the article in the phrase "specific to their own culture". There isn't one English in the world. There are now many versions which are bound to cultures and differ in the idioms and sayings used. Think about all of the sports based sayings and metaphors you are used to. Many of them won't mean much to English speakers in other countries.

Either way, communicating with people from other cultures, even when using the same language, remains a sticky wicket.

not just idioms but also pronounciation and grammar, e.g. Indian English has it's own grammatical rules distinct from others, and it certainly also applies to British/US English and others.

I'd say that most languages go into a much deeper level of detail than English does, by default.

What do you mean by level of detail? That concepts are spelled out more explicitly?

I think most languages and cultures have conceptual shortcuts. Every culture/language has their “Shaka, when the walls fell” from Star Trek (here I go with the conceptual shortcuts).

I mean more like they seem to prefer spelling out the exact problem, instead of using a generic phrase, like "this solution has proven inadequate".

Which languages and in which contexts?

Gendered articles and honorifics come to mind, that's where for example German has more "details" that afaik don't really exist in a comparable version in English, like duzen vs siezen.

Articles themselves are relatively rare (though they're a European areal feature, to the extent that they're added into some languages that otherwise wouldn't have them). Gender is another thing that isn't universal at all - and where it does exist, is more likely to distinguish between, say, long pointy things, humans, and non-flesh food than between masculine and feminine.

Not like that. It's more about what amount of information you are expected to share in any given context vs. what would be seen as excessive, such as would you expect to hear "there was an accident" or "a valve broke and the cooling fluid spilled".

You won't find things like this in a grammar book, it's kid of more like what bitrate the language aims for.

At the very least Indians, Chinese and Japanese complain about those, and English speakers who learn them face the opposite problem, at least with the latter two, so it isn't a native/non native problem.

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