The Unstoppable Invasion of Anglicisms in Business: Is it Snob or Inevitable?

2023-06-01 15:43:27

BarcelonaWhen the journalist Mar Galtés started writing about economics, entrepreneur it was still an adjective applied to a lifelong entrepreneur who had taken risks and succeeded: the founder of KH7, Chupa Chups or Europastry. And even someone who set up a bar. From 2000, with the boom of the economy then called puntcom, the entrepreneur became someone who embarked on a technology-based business like those succeeding in Silicon Valley. “The moment the digital industry and the investment industry develops here, the vocabulary no longer translates and you talk about start-ups, de venture capital and ebitda, when here we had always talked about operating results”, explains the current corporate development director of Tech Barcelona and author of Barcelona Startup (Libros de Cabecera, 2020). If English was already the language of business, with the turn of the century and the evolution of new economic products, Anglicization has skyrocketed. For the linguist Màrius Serra, this mirroring is an “exaggerated” and at the same time “irreversible” trend. “It’s like there’s one globbish where airports, shopping centers and all the most marked economic functioning mechanisms come together. They all speak the language of business, that is business friendly“, he states.

Using this new language also implies a change in the business cycle, more cosmopolitan and innovative. “businessman is a familiar word and entrepreneur has the fresh connotation and cool of the trend coming from the United States,” says Galtés. The new generations of entrepreneurs have been trained in international business schools, have worked abroad and work in multicultural teams with investors, suppliers and customers from all over the world. world Gerard García (Barcelona, ​​1994), founder and CEO of Deale, a start-up which they have named as the Tinder of SMEs, confirms that “in the working world, in the investment banking and consulting environment, all materials and many conversations are in English, and you end up adopting all these terms.” His two working years in New York were definitive. “I realize this when I ask a lifelong manager to pass me one slide [diapositiva]”, exemplifies.

“No matter how much you work in Barcelona, ​​it is likely that you have a Turkish supplier, that the logistics are Chinese, that you work with dollars and the sector moves in English,” says entrepreneur Gerard García

If traditional companies focused on the Spanish market and had an export department that spoke English, “companies that are born with global ambitions must already do their storytelling in English, because that’s how they will explain it,” says Galtés. In Barcelona, ​​30% of people who work in the digital sector are foreigners, according to the study Digital Talent 2022. In companies likeunicorn TravelPerk, which is dedicated to travel for companies and has 800 workers in Barcelona, ​​the official language is English because its staff has 58 nationalities and most of its customers are also from abroad. At the hub digital of Nestlé, of 700 people, 60% are foreigners of 50 nationalities. “No matter how much you work in Barcelona, ​​it is likely that you have a Turkish supplier, that the logistics are Chinese, that you work with dollars and that the sector moves in English,” says García, who estimates that 30% of his time speaks in English from Barcelona.

La ‘tribu LinkedIn’

“One of the great characteristics of the Catalan business fabric is its high degree of internationalization, so that it has ended up incorporating many terms in English in its day-to-day life”, explains Albert Castellanos, Secretary of Business and Competitiveness and CEO of ACTION. English is the language of international relations, innovations, software, even “meetings at events held in Barcelona such as Mobile World Congress, 4YFN or ISE are in English”, he adds. For workers in the sector it is simply a matter of practicality and a sign of wealth while, for the layman, business jargon can be incomprehensible and ridiculous, especially if the mixture of languages ​​is decontextualized and unnecessary, either because you work in a local context or because words are said in English that have always existed in Catalan (budget, prospect, deadline…). Linguists see “a certain snobbery” and a “fashionable issue”. Anglicisms are also expanding because they are a way of demonstrating, on the part of workers in the sector, that they are part of the tribu Linkedin. Translate a business position in English dress more and speak marketing gives rank and professionalism. “It might make someone gawky and snobbish, but if you scratch, if you’ve lived outside and you talk to people in New York, Milwaukee, London and Italy, you notice very quickly who’s pushing it. I sometimes tell myself “I’m stupid, if I can say the same thing” and sometimes they make fun of me, but it’s a joke that I have a hard time avoiding,” García admits.

English has an undisputed global force, a force not even standard Chinese, with 1.2 billion speakers. This is why anglicisms are not exclusive to the business sector or to Catalan and are widespread in strong languages ​​even before the concept of globalization became popular. “People have been looking for decades partners and not partners”, says Màrius Serra. The challenge of the language is how it enters them and to what extent the invasion of English is given a free hand so that it does not end up being catanglish. Two months ago, the party of the Italian Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni, presented a proposed law to punish the use of anglicisms and foreignisms in the public administration. theanglomania would be fined between 5,000 and 100,000 euros. “I wouldn’t worry about Italians – says Montserrat Serra, Termcat linguist -. A language, if it’s useful, has no problems. There are 60 million Italians who speak Italian; even if they use English words, the essence will remain . In medium languages ​​like Catalan or the Scandinavian languages ​​it is different,” he says. In the Nordic countries, they are observing that English is beginning to marginalize the national languages. “There is room for improvement – says the CEO of ACCIÓ -. The presence of Catalan in the productive sphere has not reached the level it should due to its power and its consumers”.