In the world of sports, we know that playing at home brings an advantage. We can see this, for example, with the teams in the Champions League that fight until the last game if they know that victory allows them to decide the next tie in their stadium, just like in the NBA, where the regular season determines who plays the decisive phase and who has the domestic factor in their favour. And of course, they have good reasons for doing so; playing at home means being in a familiar environment, surrounded by our loved ones in a space we know well, where everything is in its place and we move comfortably and without doubting at every step whether we are doing it right. In fact, and as in many other things, sport is the perfect metaphor, since, in the business world, speaking in one’s language is also like playing at home.
In an increasingly global economy, relationships between economic agents from different cultural and linguistic realities assume growing importance, both in face-to-face meetings that involve trips abroad as well as through new technologies that allow instant communication. In both cases, but especially when we can shake the other person’s hand, negotiation, understood as the communication game between entities with their own and often different interests and goals, is based on a balance of power and persuasion, sublimated by the building of language. If the chosen language, in whose version of the structure we can call language, is the native one of one of the interlocutors, the other clearly plays away from home. By not fully mastering the language, you will not be totally comfortable in your role, you will not know the corners of the language as well as the other and you will doubt whether a certain word will be misinterpreted in the context of the meeting.
Furthermore, the effort required of the non-native to simply be able to communicate is greater, taking away concentration and energy for other fundamental aspects of the negotiation. On the other hand, a negotiation based on a language to which both are foreigners can in theory equalise the balance, but practice usually shows that knowledge of this third language usually causes new imbalances, and most of the time this language is English.
In summary, knowledge of the fundamentals of language, even in our native tongue, provides a competitive advantage that companies must know how to value. Transposition to international markets and permanent and instant contact with the world implies going further and recognising that we are no longer playing at home, and very possibly we are playing at each other’s homes. In many cases, success depends on our ability to level the balance and reverse the power relationship, this if we want to win the tie and not just a match now and then.