The Foreign Language Needs of U.K.-Based Corporations

Abstract

With Europe as its principal export market today, the United Kingdom is beginning to understand the importance of foreign languages for success. The advent of the single European market will massively reinforce the integration of the United Kingdom as a trading nation into the European Community, while there is a clearly defined trend toward the creation of transnational companies alongside multinationals and U.K.-based exporters. Europe will remain a culturally and linguistically diverse market in both consumer taste and management style, requiring linguistic and intercultural skills for successful marketing and for internal company communication in the new transnationals. Summarizing the functions of foreign language competency in exporting and in multi- and transnational corporations, the article concludes with a look at Europe's broader future developments. The opening up of Eastern Europe, which will be dominated economically by Germany, will see the emergence of German as the European lingua franca alongside English but will not remove the need in the United Kingdom for French, Spanish, or the principal languages of the Middle and Far East, Arabic and Japanese, for global trading.