Bad English.

Language is a key part of my everyday worklife. I listen and speak to people, read and write stuff constantly. While I get to speak my own mother tongue at home with my kids, that is not the language I usually work in. Neither is Finnish, the dominant native language in my home country where I live and work, but most of my work day is communicating in English. The multicultural and international environment is great, I truly enjoy it - and don’t mind a slight misunderstanding here or there, especially while talking you can quickly double check things.

But where this becomes a bit awkward is on the official side. When documents like diplomas, titles, letters etc need to be written in English - still a foreign language to most of us, a very small percentage here are native speakers, errors are not as easy to brush off as something equally funny and cute. They are embarrassing.

The question rises, what should be the demand level for such documents then? Finland has been bilingual for years, so we do have a tradition to translate stuff - have official documents in multiple languages. We should know this already. But also the quality of the language used in the “other domestic” language has deteriorated. Does it matter? 

I think it does. It’s not that I want to police the use of language. I truly don’t mind a punctuation error or word spelled wrong, but the accumulation of these errors does worry me, because language is the way we communicate - and if we ignore the noise in this communcation, also our capability to understand each other is eventually hampered. This will start to happen at the stage when words are interpreted wrong, semantics become obfuscated or sentence structures turn their intended meaning upside down. We just need to pay attention to the language we use. Nothing more, nothing less. And ask for advice, double check, if not sure.