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Hm. A lot of the time we just use the English ones, really. Legolas Send a noteboard - 23/05/2019 10:23:42 PM

View original postDoes business speak exist in other languages? Do French, Dutch or Flemish utilize buzzword jargon? Or is this an English phenomenon? I must know this.

In international companies here in Flanders or similarly 'open' countries (Scandinavia, Netherlands, etc), a good part of written communication is in English anyway, even if everybody in the conversation is a native speaker of Dutch (not sure if you realized that Flemish and Dutch are variants of the same language, no more different than British and American English). And when it isn't, you'd still encounter a good number of English loanwords in the Dutch, even when perfectly good Dutch translations of those words exist. If you were typing these types of rants as a Belgian, a lot of them would probably be about that - people who use too many English words in Dutch sentences for no good reason (also in their personal lives, for that matter). Or about the mistakes people make in English. Though personally I kind of like the way that various nationalities each have their own version of English as a second language, each with its own typical mistakes or strange ways of phrasing things (e.g. if you ever see/hear somebody writing or saying 'it are', you can be pretty sure they're a native Dutch or German speaker).

But anyway, yes, I guess we do also have buzzword jargon in Dutch, or actual translations of English buzzwords instead of just copying them as is.

In French, the influence of English is much less strong, although they're more sensitive about it. I don't really know about buzzwords - I do use it professionally but not that much and usually not in the contexts where you'd get a lot of management speak.

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