You both spoke English. That was the problem.
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 âthatâs quite interestingâ, they may mean they dislike the idea. When they say âIâll bear that in mindâ, they almost certainly mean they wonât. When they ask âwould it be worth consideringâ, 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.
