Research on English as a Business Lingua Franca (BELF) (Kankaanranta & Louhiala-Salminen, 2013) has made great strides in the last 15 years, as it explores the dominance of English in global business as a language that connects people working globally.
This paper aims to shed light on inequality, power relations and restrictions among BELF users; these issues have been relatively downplayed in the previous BELF research, and to explore a more realistic picture of BELF in the diverse workplace worldwide.
English is the only world language used by more non-native speakers than native speakers (Crystal, 2018), and English proficiency has been widely promoted as necessary knowledge and the required skills to engage in workplaces internationally, regardless of their mother tongues (Neeley, 2012).
BELF research has accumulated empirical evidence that using English in business is goal-oriented and pragmatic. The research of BELF has contributed to the understanding that English in global business is less bounded by the native standard of English, and is relatively accessible to non-native English speakers (Louhiala-Salminen & Kankaanranta, 2011).
However, BELF has also been criticised for downplaying potentially negative consequences associated with BELF proliferating, and thus, promoting the "illusive success" of the monolingual approach by relying on English as a lingua franca (Horn et al., 2020; Piekkari et al., 2020).
Building on the previous BELF research development, this paper reflectively explores BELF by focusing on the implications of language asymmetry (Detzen & Löhlein, 2020), including inequality, power relations and restrictions from the perspectives of individual, non-native BELF users from Japan, where English is often positioned as a gatekeeper for engaging in the global workforce. The thematic analysis of the qualitative interviews of 28 Japanese business people who use English at work revealed that such language asymmetry imposes significant challenges for BELF users, as they confront the constraints with distinct strategies.
It further argues that the critical investigation of the negative consequences of BELF would make BELF research a more robust and valuable approach to examining and understanding people working in global business.
Crystal, D. (2018). The Cambridge encyclopedia of the English language. Cambridge university press.
Detzen, D., & Löhlein, L. (2020). "Towards a Framework of Individuals'' Responses to Language Asymmetry." In S. Horn, P. Lecomte, & S. Tietze (Eds.), Managing Multilingual Workplaces (pp. 122–138). Routledge.
Horn, S., Lecomte, P., & Tietze, S. (2020). Managing multilingual workplaces: methodological, empirical and pedagogic perspectives. Routledge.
Kankaanranta, A., & Louhiala-Salminen, L. (2013). "What language does global business speak?" – The concept and development of BELF. Ibérica, 26, 17–34.
Louhiala-Salminen, L., & Kankaanranta, A. (2011). Professional Communication in a Global Business Context : The Notion of Global Communicative Competence. IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, 54(3), 244–262.
Neeley, T. B. (2012). Global business speaks English: Why You Need a Language Strategy Now. Harvard Business Review, 90(May), 116–124.
Piekkari, R., Tietze, S., Angouri, J., Meyer, R., & Vaara, E. (2020). Can you speak Covid‐19? Languages and social inequality in management studies. Journal of Management Studies, 1–5.
