Our longtime member and Business English Communication Trainer, Louise Goodman, shared some insights about how business communication in English has changed and therefore what you can do to become more self-confident and reach your business aim more effectively.

People often choose to start a course in Business English as a mean to improve their career and educational prospects. The English language itself estimated as the 3rd largest mother tongue in the world. This further enhance the importance of Business English as the global marketplace, a prerequisite to modern international cooperation.

The fastest-spreading language in human history, English is spoken at a useful level by some 1.75 billion people worldwide—that’s one in every four of us. There are close to 385 million native speakers in countries like the U.S. and Australia, about a billion fluent speakers in formerly colonized nations such as India and Nigeria, and millions of people around the world who’ve studied it as a second language. An estimated 565 million people use it on the internet.

Why is Business English so important?

Studying Business English teaches you the vocabulary that you would use in business and in the working world. As well as learning corporate-speak, you also learn how to do business related tasks that would be the norm in general working settings. These include things like business writing and reports, how to deliver presentations, put forth opinions and conduct meetings.

Other aspects of learning Business English can include writing letters and emails, applying for roles and understanding job profiles. Some Business English courses can also prepare you for life in a corporate, office environment.

English has developed to become the universal language for business around the world. English unites people and companies from different backgrounds, countries and languages and allows them to communicate in a clear and effective way. That’s why Business English is so important; having a good grasp of English that you can apply to business, will be an attractive asset to employers.

But courses are not only the only way to be successful at work and during the night, we learn and share some insights about how business communication in English has changed and therefore what you can do to become more self-confident and reach your business aim more effectively.

Although the Internet came into existence in the second half of the twentieth century, its influence on language began to escalate in 1990 onwards. It has drastically changed the way people communicate and use English both in writing and speaking.

Consequently, the world has become increasingly interconnected through synchronous and asynchronous communicational scripts, such as SMS, online chat, Yahoo messengers, emails, blogs, and wikis,

The arrival of Web 2.0 tools and applications, such as Facebook, Twitter, Skype, WhatsApp, and Viber, can likewise reveal changes that English has recently undergone. The Internet has given rise to what is arguably a new variety of English that differs from standard varieties. The pervasiveness of the Internet has led to new changes in form and usage described as Internet English.

Text edited by Alissia Molteni