Breaking the accent barrier: Why non-native speakers may be better communicators in global teams

Mike Szymanski was born and raised in Poland, but in 2011, he moved to Canada to do graduate work in international management at the University of Victoria. In his third year, he had to start teaching. That was when he began to worry.

“I knew my course content, and I was prepared,” he says now. He also, at this point, spoke English fluently. “But I had this feeling in my head or in my heart that the students were going to make fun of me because of my accent, and maybe they couldn’t understand the words that I was saying, and this was going to be a total car crash.”

As it turned out, no one made fun of his accent. In fact, at the end of the semester, students wrote in course evaluations that he was the only professor they could understand. Meanwhile, another professor, a native English speaker who had been teaching in the department for many years, learned from his own evaluations that students found him difficult to understand because of his accent.

How was it possible, Szymanski wondered, that the students could understand a Pole who spoke English as his third language better than they understood a Canadian?

Further investigation showed that the majority of the students were non-native English speakers themselves. “When you’re a native speaker,” Szymanski explains, “you don’t really think about the way you communicate because it’s just natural. For non-native speakers, it’s a different story. You think very carefully about what you’re going to say.” And perhaps the students identified with him because he was also a non-native speaker and understood this.

The Role of Accents in Global Communication

Szymanski, now a clinical associate professor of business administration at Gies College of Business at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, realized that – contrary to expectations – non-native speakers are not always at a disadvantage in the classroom or business world.

This discovery also helped form the basis of his latest paper, co-authored with Carlo Brighi of Ivey Business School at Western University in Canada, “‘Do you understand me correctly?’ The role of accents in communication in global virtual teams,” recently published in the Journal of International Management.

The paper describes a study Szymanski and Brighi conducted during Global Network Week 2022, an event organized by an international consortium of top MBA programs. The 117 participants in the study came from 23 different countries. All of them were MBA students who were fluent in English and had worked at multinational corporations where English was the common language, but only half were native English speakers.

Each participant was asked to imagine they were a project leader at a consulting firm who needed to provide feedback in English to a junior colleague who had submitted some sloppy work. This feedback would be in the form of email and voicemail. Then each message would be evaluated for clarity, helpfulness, and politeness by a panel of three other participants, a mixture of native and non-native English speakers.

Initially, Szymanski thought that the voicemails would be received much more positively than the emails because they had more of a human touch. But this was not the case.

“All of the native speakers understood each other, and all of the non-native speakers understood each other’s intentions,” he says. “But when there was a native to non-native or a non-native to a native speaker, well, this is really where some miscommunication happened.”

At first, the researchers thought it might be a matter of culture. But it didn’t seem to make a difference if, say, a native Portuguese speaker was sending a voicemail to a native Chinese speaker, despite their different accents. They still understood each other better than they understood an American or a Canadian.

Why was that? The reason, essentially, was the same reason Szymanski’s first class of non-native speakers found him easier to understand than their Canadian professor, despite his Polish accent: “Non-native speakers are much more conscious, or you can even say self-conscious, about how they communicate,” says Szymanski. “They might be paying more attention to how they are communicating, so they are much more effective in that.”

Non-native speakers may also feel more of a sense of solidarity with each other than they do with native speakers, even if they come from different countries or cultures. They’ll communicate more with each other and exchange information in English, even if it’s not their first language.

The reason for this, Szymanski says, might be based on social identity theory, which posits that a person’s identity is built around the groups they belong to. “As people, we try to find markers or cues that will tell the difference between a member of a group and an outsider,” he explains. “And language, because language is everywhere, can be used as one of those markers.”

Implications for Multinational Corporations and Virtual Teams

In terms of his experiment, native English speakers formed one group, while non-native speakers, regardless of what country they came from, formed another.

As a follow-up, Szymanski would like to run a variation of the experiment using a behavior lab rather than a questionnaire to gauge listeners’ reactions to the same messages read by a native speaker and a non-native speaker.

There are important lessons people who work at multinational corporations can draw from this. In old-fashioned, in-person offices, coworkers may have spent enough time together to get used to one another’s accents. But in virtual teams, where colleagues may talk for only a few hours a month over the phone or video chat, people need to pay more attention to who they’re talking to. That means not only adjusting the message, but also the medium. A voicemail may have more of a human touch, but it could be more easily misunderstood. An email, while perhaps “less human” carries less risk of being misunderstood.

“That's a misconception people have that a native speaker will always be better at communicating regardless of the context,” Szymanski says. “The thing is that the context matters. Details matter. The people that participated in this experiment have a strong command of English. They read complex financial statements, they run marketing campaigns in that language. You cannot argue that they are not proficient or they are not fluent. The differentiating factor was their accent, and it mattered.”