Articles why english is important

Last, but certainly not least, most of the content available on the internet is in English. Learning the language will allow you to access information that otherwise may not be available to you. Your connection might be slow.

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Please accept cookies for a better experience on our website. Here are the 6 most important reasons to learn English 1. Widely spoken When considering why learning English is important, this is perhaps the biggest factor you should consider.

Career booster As the primary language of business, it is important — no, imperative — to know how to speak English when talking to international colleagues or customers. Not that hard no, really! Fluency in English, both written and spoken plays a critical role in many aspects of corporate life from securing employment to communicating with clientele and achieving cohesive business partnerships all over the world.

English has now become a global language for business all over the world to such an extent that it is the standard official language in certain industries such as the shipping and airline industries. It has resulted in the knowledge of English being a near-mandatory requirement for critical jobs such as airline pilots and naval officers, etc.

It is mainly because almost all forms of business communication such as emails, presentations, sales and marketing and even corporate legal documentation are now carried out in English. But to survive and thrive in a global economy, companies must overcome language barriers—and English will almost always be the common ground, at least for now. The fastest-spreading language in human history, English is spoken at a useful level by some 1.

There are close to million native speakers in countries like the U. An estimated million people use it on the internet. Adopters will find significant advantages. The need to tightly coordinate tasks and work with customers and partners worldwide has accelerated the move toward English as the official language of business no matter where companies are headquartered.

If you want to buy or sell, you have to be able to communicate with a diverse range of customers, suppliers, and other business partners. Companies that fail to devise a language strategy are essentially limiting their growth opportunities to the markets where their language is spoken, clearly putting themselves at a disadvantage to competitors that have adopted English-only policies. Language differences can cause a bottleneck—a Tower of Babel, as it were—when geographically dispersed employees have to work together to meet corporate goals.

An employee from Belgium may need input from an enterprise in Beirut or Mexico. Without common ground, communication will suffer. Better language comprehension gives employees more firsthand information, which is vital to good decision making. Negotiations regarding a merger or acquisition are complicated enough when everybody speaks the same language.

A branding element can also come into play. In the s, a relatively unknown, midsize Italian appliance maker, Merloni, adopted English to further its international image, which gave it an edge when acquiring Russian and British companies. To be sure, one-language policies can have repercussions that decrease efficiency.

Proper rollout mitigates the risks, but even well-considered plans can encounter pitfalls. Here are some of the most common. No amount of warning and preparation can entirely prevent the psychological blow to employees when proposed change becomes reality.

She had been communicating in English with non-French partners for some time, and she saw the proposed policy as a positive sign that the company was becoming more international.

That is, until she attended a routine meeting that was normally held in French. She recalls walking into the meeting with a lot of energy—until she noticed the translator headsets. Given the size and growth of the Chinese economy, why move to an English-only policy? There are two reasons for this. First, English has a giant head start. The British Empire began embedding the English language in many parts of the world as early as the 16th century. Philanthropic work by American and British organizations further spread English, long before corporations began to adopt it at the workplace.

Second, for much of the world, Mandarin is extremely difficult to learn. But for now, Mandarin is not a realistic option for a one-language policy. An English mandate created a different problem for a service representative at GlobalTech. Based in Germany, the technology firm had subsidiaries worldwide. Hundreds of thousands of dollars were at stake for both the customer and GlobalTech.

Hans quickly placed a call to the technical department in India, but the software team was unable to jump on the problem because all communications about it were in German—despite the English-only policy instituted two years earlier requiring that all internal communications meetings, e-mails, documents, and phone calls be carried out in English. As Hans waited for documents to be translated, the crisis continued to escalate. Two years into the implementation, adoption was dragging.

When nonnative speakers are forced to communicate in English, they can feel that their worth to the company has been diminished, regardless of their fluency level. Such feelings are common when companies merely announce the new policy and offer language classes rather than implement the shift in a systematic way.

That can be a bitter pill to swallow, especially among top performers. Others may take more aggressive measures to avoid speaking English, such as holding meetings at inopportune times. Employees in Asia might schedule a global meeting that falls during the middle of the night in England, for instance. In doing so, nonnative speakers shift their anxiety and loss of power to native speakers. Many FrenchCo employees said that when they felt that their relatively poor language skills could become conspicuous and have career-related consequences, they simply stopped contributing to common discourse.

In other cases, documents that are supposed to be composed in English may be written in the mother tongue—as experienced by Hans at GlobalTech—or not written at all. The bottom line takes a hit when employees stop participating in group settings. Once participation ebbs, processes fall apart. Companies miss out on new ideas that might have been generated in meetings.