English Use in Foreign Setting Revisited: Is Forceful Use of a Foreign Language Leading to Cultural Conflict?

One of the most difficult things about working in a foreign setting is the need to communicate with locals in the local language.  Many people are not talented in the art of learning new languages, and many locals have not had experience having to slow down their usual ways of talking to accommodate nonnative speakers of their local language.  The result is frustration on both sides.  For the learner, it is a daunting experience of facing an unknown tongue spoken with plenty of ridiculous speed and incomprehensive slangs. 

For the local, it is simply difficult to handle just how poorly a bunch of foreigners cannot learn their (in their mind, very simple) local language.  On the foreigners’ side, the frustration often boils over when they expect locals to speak English.  In the foreigners’ minds, English, being the international language of global communications, should be spoken at least in a basic degree by everyone everywhere.  The failure to at least make out simple sentences in it, for them, is perplexing.

The demand for English reminds me of my personal experience from years ago working at Rakuten.  The rather radical move by Internet service company Rakuten to use English as the official language for all company communications has drawn considerable attention from the business circle in Japan. Yet, as some praise the company for displaying ambitions in expanding globally and others criticize the move as ineffective from a human resource perspective, no one seems to be considering this proposal from a socio-cultural perspective.

When we are simply using English as the irreplaceable global tool of business communication, we keep it simply, straightforward, and completely devoid of the cultural factors that may just serve to confuse the non-native speaker without adding anything productive to business transactions.  But by coercing all casual chats to be conducted entirely in English, Rakuten is attempting to use English as a cultural communication tool as well as a business one. 

Yet English cannot clearly represent non-Western cultural concepts, so its exclusive use in a non-English setting can only lead to really obvious cultural awkwardness with all the wrong cultural nuances, even if the English that is being spoken and written are completely fluent. A culture creates a language to communicate common experience, and the resulting language becomes the exclusive representation of its parent culture after centuries of symbiotic development. 

Taking away the language from the culture is like taking a baby away from its mother.  Enormous confusions will ensue in the language that will reduce confidence of the native speakers in their own culture for failing to protect the language.  By conversing in English when English is not required, aren't we glorifying English to a point that it is no longer just a convenient tool for global communication? Isn't replacing your language with English in a non-English environment just an obvious sign of lack of confidence in your own culture?

Indeed, the very idea of bringing English as a communication tool to a populace that does not speak it natively smacks of forced Westernization in the modern setting.  Even in locales where English has been more or less successfully “localized” (such as India, Singapore, and Philippines), there remains official demands to speak “correct” English a la British or American style.  The idea of English language representing Western culture has not gone away.

The result of hastily throw up demands to communicate via English, then, is to introduce potential cultural conflicts, often in places where such conflicts did not exist consciously in the first place.  Even when one intended the language to be a mere tool of communication, the fact that it is to be used in a locale where it never naturally existed cannot escape the possibility of a struggle where the culture associated with English aims to mold and suppress the local culture.  To avoid such conflicts, it is better if the English speaker simply learns to speak the local language.