Source : Languages and business website, July 2011
Although recent studies show that companies benefit from multilingualism and the intercultural skills of their collaborators, English is still often the lingua franca in business and working relations. According to Kathryn Board, Chief Executive at CILT, the National Centre for Languages, "English is certainly a very important - perhaps the most important - language for international exchange, but in my experience many other languages are used as linguae francae: Arabic and Urdu; in Eastern Europe German or Russian, and of course in China Mandarin is itself something of a lingua franca." In situations where an English native speaker is in the room, the spoken language tends to be English, "and so our perceptions of the importance of English can easily be over-stated". Kathryn Board has herself worked in Latin America, where she could not have survived either professionally or socially without Spanish.
Kathryn Board and her colleagues are particularly keen to develop strategies which look at the full range of languages spoken by communities and to explore ways of building on the rich multilingualism which already exists. She talked to us about promoting multilingualism in the UK and developing activities linking employers with schools with regard to language learning.