This study investigates level of formality in international students’ emails sent to academic staff. National cultures have different traditions when it comes to adopting an egalitarian or a more distant student–professor relationship. Hofstede's cultural dimension of power distance (PD) is used to distinguish between relatively high and relatively low PD cultures. The students’ choice of initial greeting and complimentary close is discussed with respect to PD ranking, rapport management and the sociopragmatic conventions set out in business communication literature. The analysis is based on 344 emails written by 110 students in Norway, a low PD culture. The findings indicate that students from relatively high PD cultures are more likely to opt for formal alternatives, concluding that national culture is an aspect to take into account when analysing lingua franca English communication.

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Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore how corporate values are interpreted by local and international employees in a multilingual organisation that has opted for the local language, not English, as its corporate language. Design/methodology/approach This is a research paper exploring how the recontextualisation and resemiotisation of value terms impact on how corporate values are interpreted, employing triangulation of questionnaire and interview results. Findings When values are recontextualised in employee discourse, proficiency in the corporate language and cultural background was found to have an impact on their interpretation. Internationals were found to have a broader and not exclusively professional interpretation compared to the locals. Internationals with a low level of proficiency in the local language were more sceptical than the locals as to whether there was a shared understanding of the values. Research limitations/implications The questionnaire yielded fewer respondents than the authors expected, which should be taken into account when interpreting the results. Practical implications The paper suggests best practices for communicating corporate values to a multilingual workforce. Social implications This paper contributes to the understanding of linguistic challenges in the multilingual work contexts. Originality/value To the authors’ knowledge, there is little prior in-depth research on how language impacts on employees’ interpretation of corporate values. As values are cohesive devices in organisations, the language used to convey them is worth addressing as the present paper aims to demonstrate.

Organisations recruiting knowledge workers worldwide face a considerable challenge with regard to the choice of corporate language. The use of English as a lingua franca is often perceived as the most obvious option. However, there may be good arguments for using the host country language even in cases where the language in question is relatively small and the English skills of the local population are high. Our paper reports on the results of a study of a Nordic organisation that has chosen the local language as its corporate language. We investigate the implications for the employees' professional and social identity and also discuss the language ideology underlying this choice. The study is based on both interviews and a survey conducted among both local and international members of the organisation 2

This article addresses the combination of proper name and descriptive appositive in expository news texts, e.g. Thorn EMI, the music and rental group. This apposition construction is particularly frequent in news texts. It may well be that, like translators, journalists have to make assumptions concerning the situational and cultural context they share with their readership, and, as a result, feel compelled to add information if they consider this necessary for identifying the reference of the proper name in question. Thus, the term explicitation taken from translation theory can also be applied to news texts. It is argued that the construction is more typical of news items than of other kinds of newspaper prose, such as feature material. In addition to identification, the construction also serves to establish the newsworthiness of the person or entity referred to. Unlike previous research, this article focuses on proper names in general, not only on those with personal reference. The analysis is based on a corpus of 3,039 examples taken from two British quality newspapers, The Times and the Financial Times.