The Greatness and Difficulty of English 

English is spoken in the big cities of just about any country an American tourist might visit. Do anything touristy, like check in to a hotel or go to a restaurant or go shopping, and you will find people that can speak to you in English – and it’s not only because it helps them relieve you of your American dollars.

One reason English is so widely spoken is, of course, because the US dollar is the world’s go-to currency and American tourists spend more dollars while traveling overseas than any other nationality.

But there is another reason that language experts say is equally or more important. Among the major languages of the world, English is one of the easiest to learn. Its grammar is simpler than that of the Romance languages (French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and Romanian). And its diction is easier than German.

If you’ve ever compared the length of books written in English to versions translated into other languages, you may also have noticed that the English versions are usually considerably more compact. This is because English has a comparatively huge vocabulary due to its long history of readily incorporating words from other languages, including languages as diverse as Chinese, Japanese, Farsi, Hindi, and Native American dialects.

The worldwide acceptance of English is a benefit that English speakers that don’t travel abroad don’t have the opportunity to appreciate. If you want to say something and be understood in distant parts of the globe, English is always your best bet.

But there is a problem with English as a lingua franca that is seldom discussed. I’m talking about communication between English speakers with different accents. I’ve been to most of the world’s countries where English is at least one of its official languages. And I can tell you that communicating in some of those countries is not easy.

For example, I have great difficulty understanding the English spoken in northern England, Ireland, and Scotland. In parts of the Caribbean – I’m thinking of Grand Cayman, Bermuda, the Bahamas, and the British Virgin Islands – I have considerably fewer problems than I have in northern England, Ireland, and Scotland. But I have more difficulty in Jamaica, Trinidad, and Tobago, as well as the Turks and Caicos. It may surprise you to know that, for me, the easiest English-speaking countries are in Africa, e.g., Nigeria, Zimbabwe, and Kenya.

I’m thinking about this because of a short email exchange I had yesterday with CF, one of my three brothers. At the end of our discussion about his son’s birthday, he signed off, saying: “I am about to go into a meeting with my Indian programmers.”

I replied: “Have a good meeting… Hope you understand everything they say!”

He picked up on that and wrote, “Well, of course they speak English, and probably better than I do. But their accent is so strong that my most common response is: ‘Mahesh, you have a beautiful voice and I’m sure it’s just my aged hearing, but can you repeat that and say it a bit slower.’”

“I know that very well from my visits to our Indian office in Mumbai,” I wrote back. “My partners and I would be meeting with six or eight people – all smart, college educated, etc. But there was always one whose accent was so thick that I could not understand a word. Like you do, I would politely ask him to repeat what he had just said. And he would… exactly the way he had said it the first time. Because everyone else in the room had seemed to understand him perfectly, he had no reason to think my problem was his accent. He probably thought my mind had drifted. So I’d say something like, ‘I sort of see what you mean, but I’m not sure. Can you please say it again?’ He would look at me oddly, then repeat what he had just said – and again, I would comprehend nothing. At that point, thoroughly embarrassed, I would just smile appreciatively, nod, and say, ‘Ahah.’”

I am no longer directly involved in that business. But sometimes, when I think back on those conversations and the important issues we were discussing, I wonder what my embarrassment cost our business in profits. How many bad projects were approved by my “Ahahs,” and how many good projects were aborted?