7
About Us). Dopo aver brevemente descritto le caratteristiche multimediali dei siti del corpus,
l’analisi è stata eseguita seguendo due filoni principali: da una parte, l’identificazione degli
elementi tipici della varietà dello Euro-English nell’inglese scritto; dall’altra, l’esame del
linguaggio promozionale e delle strategie retoriche più ricorrenti, impiegati dalle imprese per
presentarsi e per enfatizzare le proprie eccellenze. In entrambi i casi, il software di analisi
testuale AntConc, è stato adottato come supporto informatico.
Fra i risultati degni di nota, all’interno del corpus di testi in questione sono state
rintracciate deviazioni rispetto all’inglese standard soprattutto per quanto riguarda l’ordine
sintattico delle frasi, l’uso degli articoli e dei relativi, la concordanza fra sostantivi e forme
verbali in presenza di uncountable nouns. Sono stati anche individuati un buon numero di
neologismi o pseudo-anglicismi che non esistono nella varietà standard; la tendenza
all’americanizzazione dell’inglese, come tratto distintivo dello Euro-English, non è invece
particolarmente evidente nei testi multimediali raccolti nel corpus. Per quanto riguarda il
linguaggio promozionale, sono stati identificati numerosi elementi comuni, connotati
positivamente: l’insistenza sui temi dell’affidabilità e della competenza dell’impresa,
l’attenzione rivolta alla storia aziendale a partire dalla sua fondazione, l’enfasi sulla
protezione dell’ambiente e sull’innovazione nel settore delle energie rinnovabili. Infine,
alcune scelte retoriche sono ampiamente sfruttate: dalle metafore, alle frasi marcate, all’uso
inclusivo o esclusivo dei pronomi personali, fino al linguaggio specializzato, che conferisce
maggiore credibilità alla presentazione resa di sé dall’impresa.
Infine questo lavoro offre pertanto nuovi spunti poiché analizza l’inglese europeo nella
produzione testuale scritta (su Internet), piuttosto che nel linguaggio parlato come hanno fatto
numerosi studiosi europei. Inoltre, dal momento che le pagine web restano comunque una
tipologia testuale che subisce il “controllo” da parte dell’autore e pertanto presentano un
numero limitato (rispetto alle conversazioni orali fra parlanti non nativi) di esempi attribuibili
all’inglese europeo, sono stati proposti nuovi indirizzi di indagine sempre incentrata su testi
scritti della comunicazione aziendale, dalle e-mail ai blog, in cui è probabilmente più facile
trovare elementi tipici dell’oralità e quindi più soggetti a deviazioni dallo standard. Nuove
ricerche in questi ambiti permetteranno anche di stabilire una relazione precisa fra lingua
madre (e paese di origine) dell’autore non nativo e la tipologia di caratteristiche dell’inglese
europeo presenti in questi generi testuali.
8
ZUSAMMENFASSUNG
Dieses Forschungswerk legt den Akzent auf zwei heutzutage immer mehr in engem
Kontakt mit einander stehenden Tatsachen, die zur ständig in die internationale Szenerie
versetzten Unternehmenskommunikation. Erstens, das europäische Englisch (oder Euro-
English) ist die linguistische Variante, die als Lingua Franca im europäischen Bereich von
Nicht-Muttersprachlichen mit Nicht-Muttersprachlichen verwendet wird: eine
Verkehrssprache, die bis jetzt meistens in mündlichen Interaktionen untersucht worden ist. Im
Rahmen der Debatte über sogenannte World Englishes und Mehrsprachigkeit in der EU sind
die Entwicklungstendenzen und die aus der Muttersprache der nicht-muttersprachlichen
Sprecher stammenden eventuellen linguistischen Interferenzen identifiziert worden.
Grundsätzlich ist Euro-English durch eine Reihe von Abweichungen von der
Standardvariante der englischen Sprache kennzeichnet, die trotzdem kein Hindernis für das
gegenseitige Verständnis der Kommunikationsteilnehmer darstellen. Solche Deviationen
betreffen meistens den Wortschatz, die Syntaxordnung und die Verwendung und
Zusammensetzung der sogenannten phrasal verbs. Außerdem haben Forscher die Tendenz
hervorgehoben, die Verwendung der Relativpronomen zu standardisieren und die Endung –s
der dritten Person Singular im Präsens auszulassen. Zweitens, Unternehmensidentität (oder
corporate identity) ist die Gesamtheit der Unternehmensgrundwerte und -philosophie, die als
Richtlinien jedem seiner Mitglieder im Laufe des Unternehmenslebens dienen.
Unternehmensidentität ist vielfältig und stellt einen wichtigen Schritt auf dem Weg zu mehr
Wettbewerbsfähigkeit (dem entscheidenden Faktor für Erfolg in der globalen Wirtschaft) dar.
Mission, corporate governance, social corporate responsibility, Umweltschutz und Respekt
vor der Belegschaft sind einige der wiederkehrendesten Aspekte in der Definition der
Identität.
Diese Diplomarbeit hat demnach versucht zu überprüfen, in welchem Maße
Unternehmen und Konzerne wirklich Euro-English als Kommunikationsmittel der eigenen
Unternehmensidentität anwenden, besonders durch die eigene Webseite. Aufgrund von
einigen von der EU durchgeführten Erforschungen über die Verbreitung des Englischen und
das Niveau seines Spracherwerbs in den verschiedenen Ländern (z. B. die Befragungen
Eurobarometer) und von bedeutungsvollen Aufsätzen über die Entwicklung des Englischen
auf weltweiterer Ebene (vor allem der bekannten Konzeptualisierung der Concentric Circles
von Kachru, später umgearbeitet von Berns und Cramer, so wie den Studien und
Begriffsbestimmungen von Seidlhofer und Modiano), wurden sieben Webseiten von ebenso
9
vielen zu sieben unterschiedenen EU Mitgliedsstaaten gehörenden Energie- und
Stromversorgern ausgewählt. Die Forschung hat sich dann auf die (oft About Us genannten)
Sektionen konzentriert, in denen Unternehmen sich präsentieren. Nach einer kurzen
Beschreibung der multimedialen Eigenschaften der Webseiten wurde die linguistische
Analyse durch zwei Richtungen durchgeführt: einerseits, die Identifizierung der typischen
Elemente des Euro-English im Schriftlichen; anderseits, die Untersuchung der Werbesprache
und der wiederkehrenden rhetorischen Strategien, die Unternehmen benutzten, um ihre
hervorragenden Aspekte nachdrücklich zu betonen. In beiden Fällen wurde die für
Textanalyse entwickelte Software AntConc angewendet.
Im Untersuchungskorpus wurden typische nicht-muttersprachliche Abweichungen
herausgefunden, besonders was die Syntaxordnung, die Verwendung der Artikeln und der
Relativpronomen, die Konkordanz zwischen Substantiven und Verbalformen bei uncountable
nouns angeht. Ein der bemerkenswertesten Ergebnisse ist die Präsenz einer gewissen Anzahl
von Neologismen oder Pseudo-Anglicisms, die nicht in der Standardvariante existieren; die
Tendenz zur Amerikanisierung des Englischen, als typisches Merkmal des europäischen
Englischen, ist dagegen nicht besonders erkennbar in den betreffenden Texten. Hinsichtlich
der Werbesprache ist der Nachdruck auf positive Aspekte der Unternehmen (wie z.B. ihre
Zuverlässigkeit und Kompetenz, die Unternehmensgeschichte, den Umweltschutz, die
Innovation im Bereich der erneuerbaren Energien) ein gemeinsames Merkmal im Korpus.
Außerdem werden einige rhetorische Mittel weit verwendet: Metaphern, emphatischen
Satzbau, inklusive oder exklusive Verwendung der Personalpronomen, die Fachsprache, die
zur Glaubwürdigkeit der Unternehmenspräsentation beiträgt.
Zum Schluss hat dieses Werk Euro-English in schriftlichen Webtextsorten untersucht
statt in mündlichen Textformen, wie zahlreiche europäische Forscher schon gemacht haben.
Da die Webseite jedoch als Textsorte die Verfassers Kontrolle unterliegt und deswegen eine
begrenzte Anzahl von dem Euro-English zuschreibbaren Beispielen aufweist, wurden neue
Forschungsrichtungen noch im Rahmen der schriftlichen
Unternehmenskommunikationstextsorten (E-Mails bzw. Blogs) vorgeschlagen, wo es
wahrscheinlich einfacher ist, Elemente der Mündlichkeit zu entdecken, die am meisten
Deviationen von Standardsprache unterworfen sind. Neue Untersuchungen in diesen
Bereichen werden auch erlauben, die Muttersprache (und Heimatland) des nicht-
muttersprachlichen Verfassers und die Typologie der Euro-English Merkmale in den
betreffenden Textsorten miteinander in Zusammenhang zu bringen.
10
INTRODUCTION
Business communication is becoming more and more vital to organisations,
companies and firms, be they multinational corporations or small and medium-sized
enterprises. Employers and entrepreneurs feel the urge to ‘let the people know’ what they do
and how they do it, since sharing their knowledge and increasing the awareness of their
activities in the target audiences are perceived as the sole factors able to determine their
competitive advantage and success. As a matter of fact, technology is easily imitable and
purchasable; labour can be quickly replaced and changed, but trust and reliance, fame and
confidence among the stakeholders hardly last over time, unless they are not continuously
enhanced. Communication makes its greatest contribution in this field: communicating what a
company is and does is necessary to establish fruitful and reciprocal relationships between
companies (with their leadership and management) and audiences. Web technologies have
paved the way to a regular use of communication to address as many publics as possible:
documents are exchanged in a matter of seconds between subsidiaries all over the world,
suppliers and customers can keep each other up to date as regards orders and productions
levels by means of e-mails. Blogs, the most recent technological advance, are supposed to
improve internal communication among employees. Corporate websites in turn embody the
showcase of a company, giving room to all the communicative objectives the company wants
to accomplish through them, relying on their main function of company’s self-presentation in
all their facets. Corporate websites represent also the archive of documents, press releases,
interviews, etc. made available to users in an interactive environment.
Alongside the advent of the Internet medium, the English language is gaining more
ground as the business lingua franca, in that English is acknowledged as the only linguistic
tool to be in the position to substitute other national languages. Since English is so commonly
widespread all over the earth, Mexicans and Koreans, South-Africans and Canadians,
Australians and Slovenians, Russians and Indians resort to it when negotiating orders,
alliances, supplies and products. This is particularly true in Europe, where, despite the
resistances of local communities, English is slowly becoming the privileged communication
means among Europeans in any context, from academic to institutional and last but not least
business settings. Groundwork is being laid for English to take the role of the European
Lingua Franca: regardless of regional accents and incorrect formulations due to L1 influences,
Europeans are in this way able to understand each other and to negotiate meanings without
appealing to interpreters or mediators. The term Euro-English is therefore becoming
11
widespread among experts and widely used in linguistic debates on multilingualism as well as
on World Englishes: some features have been recognised and observed above all in
conversations and computer-mediated communication forms, like e-mails or blogs. Major
contributions are those made so far by the American pioneer of the matter Margie Berns, by
an Austrian pool of researchers, led by Barbara Seidlhofer, by Jennifer Jenkins and Marko
Modiano, who lent a Swedish perspective to the debate. Having said that, it is not that English
is everywhere equally taught, used and mastered: especially in Europe, Member States do not
attach the same importance to foreign language learning with different results among their
inhabitants. On the basis of some European studies, read in the light of Kachru’s model, it
will be thus surveyed to what extent Europe may be accommodated into the Concentric
Circles and whether some distinctions between European countries may be drawn in this
respect.
To integrate the two previously mentioned domains (on the one hand, Web business
communication and corporate identity, on the other hand, the European variety of English),
the focus of the present work will be on original written texts produced by European non-
native speakers of English in the field of business, with the objective of making a valuable
contribution to the research on written European English textual production. This somehow
replies to the invitation, made in particular by Seidlhofer, to draw more attention to the
possible influences of European mother tongues also in written texts
1
, produced by non-native
speakers. For the purpose of this analysis, the Internet will prove to be an intriguing field of
research, because it has been widely acknowledged how the digital medium may have a
noticeable effect on vocabulary, grammar, register and so forth. The technical possibilities
offered by Internet texts, which are not limited by the constraints of the printed page, enable
authors to play with the dimensions of intertextuality and interactivity.
The search for a case study to which the theoretical issues of corporate identity
communication and Euro-English could be applied, was facilitated by the chance offered by
the internship, which was part of my curriculum. The experience as sales employee in a
medium-sized enterprise in Modena, an Italian leader in the production of transformers for
power plants, was the chance to learn more about great European energy suppliers and
producers, from Spain, to the Netherlands, Germany and Sweden. It is such energy and power
giants which invite tenders for specific products throughout Europe; engineering companies
(among them, the one from Modena) offer their prices and may win or lose the tender, after
1
When presenting the project of the International Corpus of Learner English (ICLE), Seidlhofer (Seidlhofer
2004: 223-224) stresses the importance of devoting further attention to written instances of ELF, in order to gain
a clearer picture of interlinguistic interferences.
12
the contractors’ examination of the offers. English is clearly an unavoidable choice to
communicate and corporate websites are an extraordinary tool to acquire information on
business activities and attitudes of the customers, as well as on the specifications of the
products. Written web texts included in the corpus will be collected from a sample of
corporate websites of European energy and power companies, in particular those belonging to
the presentation sections of the companies, called for example Who we are or About us. This
kind of choice allows us to understand, firstly, if English, written by non-native speakers in
web texts and genres, shares the same features identified by Seidlhofer and Jenkins,
principally in oral interactions; secondly, which linguistic strategies are chosen by different
companies of the same industry to present their corporate identity to the audiences they
address via the Internet.
The work will be structured in three chapters. The first one will provide an overview
of the position of English in Europe: by means of European statistics and data, a picture of the
situation will be given before analysing in depth the linguistic studies available on the issue of
Euro-English and English as a European Lingua Franca. The several scholars’ stances and the
most recent revisions of ‘90s conceptualisations will be pinpointed, as urged by European
enlargements. A paragraph will also be devoted to the debate on multilingualism and national
language maintenance, which has been taking place within the European Union institutions
and the European academic settings. The second chapter will deal with the issue of corporate
identity communication, with a detailed outline of the conceptualisations of corporate identity
and corporate communication strategies, two issues which are more and more interrelated in
today’s business management. After that, corporate websites will be analysed as “vehicles of
corporate identity”, taking into account the implications brought about by the Internet and
multimodality in business communication and genre classification. To conclude, the About-
Us sections will be closely examined as they constitute the core of the case study. Chapter 3
will properly deal with the case study: after a description of the corpus composition and of the
analysis approach, single websites and About-Us sections will be briefly described, giving an
account of their content and major technical and multimodal features. Then, the analysis will
draw on Euro-English features found in the texts and the rhetorical strategies employed to
convey the idea of corporate identity, in terms of evaluative and promotional language.
Finally, the last section will summarise the results obtained from the analysis of the corpus, in
the light of the theoretical premises of the first two chapters, drawing some conclusions on the
actual weight of Euro-English in written texts and on the rhetorical and linguistic strategies
13
companies employ to communicate their corporate identity on the Internet, besides identifying
further research areas.
14
CHAPTER 1
CONSIDERATIONS ABOUT ENGLISH IN EUROPE
1.1. English in Europe: data and figures
In 2004 and 2007, the European Union underwent two subsequent enlargements that
brought the number of Member State to 27, not only increasing its number of citizens and the
dimension of its economy, but also the number of the languages spoken: 450 million people
belonging to the most different geographical areas and cultural backgrounds are supposed to
speak 23 official languages, which have been accorded official status by the EU, and around
other 60 languages, which conversely have gained official status only in their own countries.
In the former category there are the following languages: Bulgarian, Czech, Danish, Dutch,
English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Irish, Italian, Latvian,
Lithuanian, Maltese, Polish, Portuguese, Rumanian, Slovak, Slovene, Spanish, and Swedish;
English, French and German have acquired the privileged status of working or procedural
languages, giving rise to an endless debate about the opportunity and above all the efficiency
of such a multilingual approach (see par. 1.2.). Instead, the latter group comprises all the
minority languages, like Catalan and Basque in Spain and all the various dialects or local
varieties spoken by smaller communities in limited areas or border regions.
The EU has always highlighted the striking importance of maintaining a situation of
multilingualism within its boundaries: firstly, “[m]ultilingualism is understood as the ability
of societies, institutions, groups and individuals to engage, on a regular basis, with more than
one language in their day-to-day lives [...]. In addition, the term multilingualism is used for
referring to the co-existence of different language communities in one geographical or geo-
political area or political entity. [...] [Secondly] As regards individual multilingualism,
competence in a given other language can range from partial skills competence to full
literacy” (High Level Group on Multilingualism 2007: 6). In the first case the EU has been
promoting, since the Rome Treaty of 1958 (when the European Community was formed by
only 6 Member States), the use of the languages of all the Member States at the institutional
level, fostering the ideal of a single community with a multiplicity of languages and, thus,
cultures. In the second case, the EU has underlined the profits and benefits that its citizens are
bound to gain when learning languages other than their mother tongue. For this purpose, the
European Union promotes the acquisition of more than one foreign language and constantly
15
monitors the progress of such a policy, measuring the percentage of European languages
being taught outside their own boundaries, the number of people (of all ages) who master a
foreign language and their level of competence. Similarly, the Union has a specific interest in
constantly improving its language policy and giving all its inhabitants incentives to learn
foreign languages. To sum up, the EU policy centred on multilingualism attempts to pursue
the following three aims (Special Eurobarometer 243 2006b: 1):
1. the encouragement of language learning;
2. the promotion of a healthy multilingual economy;
3. the guarantee to all EU citizens of the access to the Union’s legislation,
procedures and information in their own language.
Many of the aforementioned areas are researched by means of Europe-wide surveys
like Eurobarometer, which was lastly conducted in November-December 2005 and published
in 2006; similar investigations are also carried out by national Education Ministries and then
reported to the Directorate General for Education and Culture, which is committed to the
supervision of the language and multilingualism policy’s development all over the Union.
1.1.1 Eurobarometer. Europeans and their Languages
Going into details, the last edition of Eurobarometer
2
(namely Special Eurobarometer
243/64.3, Europeans and their Languages) proved that language skills are very dissimilar in
the Member States and that citizens especially in Eastern and Central Europe countries and in
Southern Europe need to be further encouraged to start learning a foreign language. In brief,
56% of European citizens stated to be able to hold a conversation in at least a further language
apart from their own mother tongue, showing an increase of 9% compared with the results of
Eurobarometer 55.1 (a similar enquiry conducted in 2001), although the rate of people who
have no foreign language knowledge was still rather high (44%). Ireland (66%), UK (62%),
Italy (59%), Hungary (58%), Portugal (58%) and Spain (56%) are the countries where the
majority of citizens do not speak a foreign language. Whereas Italy, Hungary, Portugal and
Spain have never had a stable language learning policy in education system, the first two
countries seem to be still so well aware of the role of English in the world that they still
refrain from studying other languages.
2
This Eurobarometer survey was conducted in the EU Member States (at that time 25 countries), in the 2
acceding countries Bulgaria and Rumania (which actually accessed in 2007) and in the 2 (still) candidate
countries Croatia and Turkey.
16
Figure 1: Which languages do you speak well enough in order to be able to have a conversation excluding your
mother tongue?, in Special Eurobarometer 243 2006a: 8
Within these percentages, some countries stand out for their extremely high percentage of
citizens that master at least one foreign language, e.g., 99% of Luxembourgish, 97% of
Slovakians and 95% of Latvians: as it may be apparent, this is probably due to historical and
geographical reasons, since Latvia was a Soviet Republic, where Russian was taught as a
compulsory language also in primary school, Slovakia belonged to the former Republic of
Czechoslovakia, which joined in the Warsaw Pact and was subject to a strong cultural and
linguistic Russian influence. On the contrary, Luxembourg inhabitants, due to the its position
between France, Belgium and Germany, are supposed to master French and German. As a
proof, 92% of Luxembourgish, together with 75% of the Dutch and the 71% of Slovenes,
stated to be able to speak two foreign languages.
Furthermore, as far as the measurement of language learners’ activity
3
is concerned,
Europeans appear to be lacking in motivation (lack of time, personal motivation and costs of
languages courses were regarded as the main factors discouraging people from learning
languages), although they are widely aware (83%) of the usefulness of knowing foreign
languages for practical reasons (mainly to go on holidays abroad and to get better job
opportunities). Starting learning at least one language at an early age is claimed to be of the
utmost importance, since 39% of Europeans seem to be in favour of their children starting
learning a foreign language even before the age of 6.
The target that the EU is eager to achieve is the so-called “mother tongue + two”,
presented for the first time during the Barcelona European Council in March 2002 (“44. The
European Council calls for further action in this field: […]: to improve the mastery of basic
skills, in particular by teaching at least two foreign languages from a very early age [...]”;
3
Active language learners are those who have either learned/improved their own language skills in the last 2
years, or intend to do so in the next year (Special Eurobarometer 243 2006b: 5).
17
Council of the European Union 2002: 19; emphasis added) and afterwards, also by the
European Commission (“to increase individual multilingualism until every citizen has
practical skills in at least two languages in addition to his or her mother tongue”, as cited in
High Level Group on Multilingualism 2007: 6), which is yet supported by a cautious 50% of
the population (as one may remember, only 28% of Europeans are at the moment able to
master two foreign languages), whereas a higher 84% agree on the fact that everyone should
speak one foreign language.
Among the languages known as foreign languages, English is the most widely spoken
one throughout Europe, as 38% of EU citizens maintained having sufficient language skills in
English to participate in a conversation: Sweden (89%), Malta (88%) and the Netherlands
(87%) have the highest percentages of the population who can master English. 14% of
Europeans master either French (mainly, in the UK and Ireland) or German (mainly in the
Czech Republic and Hungary) as foreign languages, along with their mother tongue; Spanish
and Russian (which was not surveyed in the Eurobarometer 2001) follow in the chart each
with the 6% share of Europeans knowing them. As shown in the second chart, moreover, the
English language is also the most commonly used language in Europe (51%), both as mother
tongue and as foreign language (although German is the most widely spoken mother tongue
on the continent, with the 18%).
Figure 2: Which languages do you speak well enough in order to be able to have a conversation excluding your
mother tongue?, in Special Eurobarometer 243 2006a: 12
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