English will remain as the global language of Business and Education

Globalization has fostered multiple interactions among members of different cultures to a stage never known before. Furthermore, it is foreseeable that modern technologies, Internet and the Web will intensify this communication to unimaginable extremes. It is very likely that may have as many, or even more, friends on other continents than at home. The fact that your friends may live in your antipodes will not pose any problem since you probably have access to cheap, friendly and very advanced technologies that recreate in a very vivid –even more intellectually intense- way current face -to-face conversations and relations.

This cosmopolitan on-line world will be greatly enhanced by the development of very sophisticated instant translation. Looking to the near future, Eric Schmidt (former CEO of Google) predicted simultaneous translation and truth prediction (the probability that a statement is true, sometimes difficult to judge in a foreign language).[1] The fact is that many people use Google Translator for their communications in foreign languages. However even if this occurs, different cultures will still need to use a vehicular language, sometimes referred to as "lingua franca", that is, a language which is used by a relevant number of people worldwide and that serves as an instrument for effective communication. An illustrative historical example of vehicular languages is Latin, widely extended and imposed during the Roman Empire and, interestingly, the language used by academics in the Middle Ages.  Vehicular languages are different to vernacular languages, sometimes called "native tongue", and are used mainly or exclusively in a given country or region.

 Today, English is the most widely used vehicular language and, in fact, the global working language par excellence. Its native speakers –including India- represent the greatest force worldwide, followed by Chinese and Spanish. The Web is probably the main acid test to anticipate which will be the prevalent vehicular languages of the future. Here, again, English keeps its supremacy and it seems it will become even more widely used, the "Esperanto" of our times.

 English has also become the language of global education, as described in, "English as Language of Global Education", where I was quoted [2]. There I referred to "working English", a vehicular language far from pure Oxonian English and used, effectively, by billions of humans: a mixture of each owns' vernacular expressions and accents with standard English. This has driven many people to talk about mixed languages such as "Spanglish" or "Englisch". Some believe that this jeopardizes the integrity of the English language; others that it is English at its most sublime. What do you think?

 The students of today, and the managers of tomorrow, should be able to communicate effectively in at least two vehicular languages, in addition to their own native one. Vehicular languages are the key to open other cultures. Indeed, a way to bring civilizations together, or create new ones.

 A clear evidence of this is the language of delivery of MBA programs: although English is increasingly the "lingua franca" of management education, prospective participants may apply to MBA programs delivered in Welsh or Basque languages, for example, a singular opportunity that did not exist years ago. Maybe language diversity represents a potential source of differentiation for b-schools.

 In previous sections I have concentrated mainly on different elements that foster diversity, as a reverse side of globalization. It is worth examining the role of two important agents that may balance this diversity and foster at the same time transparency and comparability across continents. I refer to rankings and accreditation systems.

Notes

This post has been adapted from my book: "The Learning Curve: How Business Schools are Reinventing Education" (London: Palsgrave Macmillan, 2011).

[1] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/10/04/google_talks_tories/

[2] D. Carvajal, ‘English as Language of Global education’, The New York Times, 11/04/2007, https://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F20714F73E5B0C728DDDAD0894DF404482