BELF : Business English as a Lingua Franca

Communication between speakers of different languages has increased exponentially in the course of the past decades in all walks of life, including in the business world. This is the case not only for internal business communication, as more and more business organisations are characterised by a multicultural, multilingual workforce, but also in external business communication, where the different stakeholders involved in the communication originate from different countries. In such commonplace situations in international business communication, whenever person A with fi rst language A speaks to person B with fi rst language B, there are four options available to them:

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