Revista
LSP Journal - Language for special purposes, professional communication, knowledge management and cognition
Abstract
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.
