Are you really sure you speak English?

Most Latin American professionals entering the British market have been speaking English for years. Many are fluent. Some are near-native. And almost all of them, at some point, walk out of a British meeting quietly unsure whether what just happened was a yes, a no, or a polite form of neither.

The issue is rarely vocabulary. It is rarely grammar. It is the gap between the English that functions as an international business tool and the English that British professionals actually use with each other — and the fact that those two things are not the same language.

The English you already speak

In 2004, Jean-Paul Nerrière coined the term Globish to describe the stripped-back subset of English that non-native speakers use in international settings: roughly 1,500 words, simplified grammar, minimal idiomatic content. It works. Across a conference table in São Paulo or Buenos Aires, two non-native speakers can conduct an entire negotiation in Globish and understand each other almost perfectly.

The problem is that British professionals are not speaking Globish. They are speaking English — the full, historically layered, culturally loaded version — and they assume you are too. When you are not, the gaps do not announce themselves. They are filled silently, by each side, with whatever their own language would mean in that moment. And what British English means in a professional context is often not what it appears to say.

The layer underneath the words

British professional communication has a parallel channel that operates entirely without words. The historian Kate Fox documented it in detail: a set of physical signals (the dry cough, the pursed lip, the raised eyebrow, the particular quality of silence that follows a suggestion) that carry as much meaning as the words they accompany, and sometimes rather more.

For the LatAm professional, this channel is largely invisible. Not because the signals are subtle — they are often quite pronounced — but because their meaning is not intuitive across cultural contexts. A British colleague who responds to your proposal with "that's quite interesting" and a slightly downward inflection is not expressing enthusiasm. A meeting that ends with "let's keep in touch" is not necessarily going to produce a follow-up. "We'll certainly consider it" has a specific meaning that has nothing to do with consideration.

These are not deceptions. They are a communication system in which indirection is the norm and directness carries its own negative signals. Learning to read them is not a linguistic task. It is a cultural one.

What this means in a British–LatAm context

The LatAm professional's default is typically more direct in expression and more explicit in relational warmth. Both of those tendencies can misfire in British professional settings without either side fully understanding why.

The English you speak and the English they mean are not the same language.

Directness that would read as refreshingly clear in a Buenos Aires or Mexico City boardroom can read as blunt or underprepared in London. Relational warmth extended early — the kind that is entirely natural and appropriate in LatAm business culture — can be received as overfamiliar before trust has been established through the British route of demonstrated reliability over time.

None of this means that British professionals are harder to work with. It means they operate in a different conversational register, and that register has its own logic. Once you can read it, interactions that previously felt ambiguous become legible. The polite deflection, the qualified enthusiasm, the meeting that ends without a clear next step, they all of these have meaning. And knowing what they mean is the difference between acting on the right signal and waiting on the wrong one.

The question is not whether you speak English. The question is whether you speak British.