Should English Even Be the Global Business Language? The Honest Answer Is No.

The “Unlearn English” Series (Post 10 of 12)

“English didn't win the global business language contest. There was never a contest.”

Should English Even Be the Global Business Language? The Honest Answer Is No. Likened to genrational hand-me downs, and like an Amoeba, everchanging shape!

English's status as the default language of international business gets treated as a natural, almost inevitable outcome, as if it simply turned out to be the most efficient, most neutral option available. It wasn't chosen for efficiency. It was installed through colonization, reinforced through the economic dominance of the US and UK in the 20th century, and then locked in by network effects once enough institutions had already built their systems around it. Calling that arrangement “neutral” is doing a lot of quiet work to make an imposed outcome sound like a fair one.

The efficiency argument doesn't hold up. Defenders call English a practical “lingua franca” that simplifies global communication. But this framing ignores who actually pays the cost of that simplification: every non-native speaker spends years and real money reaching fluency in a language they didn't choose, while native English speakers get the advantage for free, at birth, through no achievement of their own. That's not efficiency. That's a permanent, unearned tax levied on the majority of the world's population to spare a minority the trouble of ever learning anyone else's language.

Who actually benefits from the current arrangement. English-speaking countries dominate global publishing, elite university rankings, international law, and multinational leadership pipelines, in no small part because the entry price to those arenas is fluency in their native tongue. Meanwhile brilliant professionals elsewhere lose opportunities, promotions, and credibility not because their ideas or skills are weaker, but because their English carries an accent or a grammatical pattern from their first language. The current setup isn't rewarding merit. It's rewarding an accident of birthplace and calling it a skill.

The “but it's already established” defense is not an argument. Pointing out that English is already the dominant business language isn't a justification for keeping it that way, it's just a description of an unequal status quo, restated as if the fact of its existence makes it fair. Plenty of unequal arrangements persist because changing them is inconvenient for whoever currently benefits. That's not the same as those arrangements being just.