There is a particular kind of British-LatAm meeting that runs entirely in English, goes smoothly by all appearances, and produces a follow-up where both sides discover they understood something different.

Not because anyone was unclear. Not because the English was poor. But because the two sides were not, in any meaningful sense, speaking the same language.

One was speaking English. The other was speaking Globish. And nobody in the room knew the difference.

The situation

Globish — a term coined by Jean-Paul Nerriere — describes the version of English that has become the default language of international business: a subset of roughly 1,500 high-frequency words, simplified grammar, and stripped-back idiom. It is the English that gets taught in schools across Latin America, spoken at trade conferences, and used in the emails that cross between London and Buenos Aires every day.

It is also not English.

Not in the sense that matters in a British negotiation. British English is not just a vocabulary — it is a register, a set of conventions, a dense system of understatement, indirection, and implication that is largely invisible to native speakers and almost entirely opaque to Globish users. When a British professional says ‘that’s quite interesting’, they may mean they dislike the idea. When they say ‘I’ll bear that in mind’, they almost certainly mean they won’t. When they ask ‘would it be worth considering’, they are making a strong recommendation, not posing a genuine question.

A Latin American professional with excellent Globish hears the words. They miss the meaning. And they walk out of the meeting with the wrong read on where things stand.

The friction

The friction here is invisible precisely because the surface-level communication appears to be working. Both sides are speaking English. Both sides are being understood at the level of individual words and sentences. Neither side has any indication that the interpretive layer — the register, the implication, the weight of what is left unsaid — is not being shared.

This is compounded by what Kate Fox, in Watching the English, calls ‘body English’: the parallel system of tutting, eyebrow-raising, lip-pursing, and dry coughing that British professionals use to communicate in real time without words. It is a supplementary language that operates continuously alongside speech, and it is almost entirely opaque to non-native observers — including highly fluent ones.

A Latin American professional can speak excellent English, read the room attentively, and still miss half the conversation because the half that matters was never spoken aloud.

Slot v. Flow™ in action

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