Lexical variations in business e-mails written by non-native speakers of English

English is the lingua franca used in business communication. Therefore the number of non-native speakers of English already outnumbers native speakers provided that worldwide enterprises use English for international communication. The Internet has also increased the use of English as an internation...

Descripción completa

Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Carrió-Pastor, María Luisa|||0000-0002-3040-5362, Muñiz Calderón, Rut
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Fecha de publicación:2012
País:España
Institución:Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV)
Repositorio:RiuNet. Repositorio Institucional de la Universitat Politécnica de Valéncia
Idioma:inglés
OAI Identifier:oai:riunet.upv.es:10251/78139
Acceso en línea:https://riunet.upv.es/handle/10251/78139
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Lexical variations
e-mails
English as a second language
English as a foreign language
FILOLOGIA INGLESA
Descripción
Sumario:English is the lingua franca used in business communication. Therefore the number of non-native speakers of English already outnumbers native speakers provided that worldwide enterprises use English for international communication. The Internet has also increased the use of English as an international language, in this way; it is used by speakers with different linguistic backgrounds. This variety of authors produces differences or variations in language use. In this paper we contrast business e-mails written by Spanish agents who work in an exporting company in India and China. Our main aim is to analyze the possible variations due to the mother tongue and the socio-cultural context and to classify lexical variation in business English used as a global working language by non-native speakers. We intended to determine the causes of variation and their influence on discourse. We analyzed and contrasted sixty e-mails written by two groups of nonnative English speakers. Group A was composed of native speakers from Pakistan and Group B was composed of native speakers from China. The corpus analysis was carried out manually. We classified the occurrences in categories depending on the cause of the variation. After the analysis, we observed that the lexical variations found were caused by sociolinguistic and cultural influences.