Are you really sure you speak English?
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 idioms. 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, Mexico, Santiago, or Bogota 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.
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 âbody Englishâ: 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
The conversational dimension of the Slot v Flow systems addresses this directly. The gap between what is said and what is meant, between social alignment and operational alignment, is widest in precisely these meetings: the ones that run smoothly in English, with no interpreter, where everyone assumes the communication is working.
There are two practical moves worth making in any British-LatAm meeting conducted in English. The first is to close the meeting with explicit confirmation of what was agreed: not âI think we are alignedâ but a named list of specific next steps, owners, and dates. That confirmation catches the Globish gap before it becomes a follow-up problem.
The second is to treat a native English speaker in the room as a resource rather than a formality. Not for translation, but for register, someone who can tell you afterwards whether âthatâs quite interestingâ was a yes or a no. That knowledge is not a luxury. In a negotiation, it is the difference between reading the room correctly and walking away with the wrong conclusion.
Over to you
Think of the last British-LatAm meeting you conducted in English. Are you confident both sides left with the same understanding or did you assume fluency meant alignment?
Until next Tuesday,
Cecilia
Founder, Multilateral Studio ¡ Author, Slot v Flow
