I work with teams across the globe and I can say this has been true in my experience. The experience of communicating with others for whom English is not only a

I work with teams across the globe and I can say this has been true in my experience. The experience of communicating with others for whom English is not only a second language, but a lingua franca used to communicate across other language boundaries, is distinctly not one where I am the advantaged communicator, because I am the less versed speaker of the lingua franca version of the dialect. (Imagine switching from a BSD to Ubuntu with no Linux experience. Lots rhymes and sounds the same, but might trip up an experienced user who has built up years of expectations.) My wife has been showing me Twogether, a show about two celebrities from different countries whose only common language is English, and who are made to travel and perform tasks together in countries whose languages they don't speak. It's fascinating to hear the version of English they speak to each other. It's not US or UK English, it's a combination of English, Korean, Chinese, intonation, facial expression, and gesture to communicate what they need in a given moment. It was odd for me to that they were actually able to use English to communicate with each other better than I, a native English speaker, could use to communicate with either of them. Built up context and the tendency of language to take the shape of its container resulted in a patois better suited to their purposes than the language I use every day, and in a business context, pretending this doesn't happen is a recipe for failure, I believe.