Communicating in a non-native language
We will benefit having a united language for cross national communication, whilst also preserving our own native language.
However we must also be more open to accept non-native speaking people in our local businesses in the event they commit to learn the native language…
Denmark is a small country and for centuries we have interacted with our close neighbours and other countries far and wide – sometimes peacefully as tradesmen, other times violently at war to acquire land or during raids in coastal areas.
Therefore, integrated in the Danish culture is the acceptance and knowledge that you need to be able to communicate in non-native languages.
During my childhood both English and German were mandatory languages in public school, and we were also expected to be able to read books written in Swedish and Norwegian. In the last year you were offered to learn French as preparation for College.
At college German was replaced with French – and yes, even after an additional 3 years of French, for me, there is still plenty of room for improvement!
Studying at Aalborg University as an Engineer half the books were in English and during one term we even had a professor from Poland teaching us speaking English with the book and handouts in Danish.
My first position as an Engineer was at the Great Belt Link project in Denmark.
During this project I worked closely together with Germans and Americans serving in a section led by a French Manager.
Luckily the company language was English, however this turned out to be my first experience of how cultural differences and language barriers can create an unintended crisis.
Later I joined a business owned by a Swedish company, managed by Danes and officially using English as the company language, when it came to technical and project documentation.
The team cooperated with people from the USA, UK, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Switzerland and France. During this period I experienced that motivated people without a political agenda are more open to communicate despite the lack of fluency in the language selected.
My next experience was with another Scandinavian Enterprise based in Denmark. The projects involved people from Sweden, Norway, USA and Belgium.
Here I cooperated closely long-term with an American company during this period and at this time had my first real experience of the differences between traditional Oxford English versus US English.
Next experience was as employee in the Danish subsidiary of an American enterprise; however the European organization I was a part of turned out to be managed from Germany and then France with internal resources in Sweden, Denmark, Germany, England, Italy, France and USA.
One advantage during this period, it was decided that English was to be the official language of communication internally and externally, however we still experienced challenges caused by our local cultures of origin.
Sharing these small insights I hope that we globally will be more open to non-native speaking people in our local businesses as long as they are committed to learn the language.
Supporting that we must preserve our own native language – keeping the traditional well-spoken and correctly written language – it would be nice if we could agree on a united language for cross national communication.
The “SMS” abbreviated ʻtext speakʼ is in my opinion damaging our communication dramatically… itʼs like sitting at a meeting where new buzz-words/ abbreviations are thrown around and as all the participants pretend to fully understand them no-one raises the question: “What does PC mean in this context?”.
For the curious – PC has been used as the abbreviation for:
Politically Correct/ Personal Computer/ Power Controller/ Primary Centre/ Primary Contact/ and so forth…
This post is based on extracts from an article, that was published initially on LinkedIn on 2 March 2020.
Image Credits:
| Europe | Photo by USGS on Unsplash |
| Denmark | Photo by Ian on Unsplash |
| Tooth | Private Photo |
| Wishing | Photo by Gianandrea Villa on Unsplash |
Thank you for having read this article – hope you have enjoyed it.
Best wishes for the future.