Current Trends in Language Usage in International Business in India – A Conceptual Study Based on Selected Multinational Corporations in Bangalore

Language is an important part of people’s daily lives and plays a great role in their way of thinking. It determines their attitudes towards products and their decision towards purchasing products. Language is an important component of culture and has some qualities that the other components of culture cannot provide. A proper understanding of any situation is possible only when it is communicated in the language well understood by the receiver of the message. This could be an understanding of what a product is for, how to do a job in the way the Company wants it done, the company culture and behaviour as an employee of the Company can all be better understood if communicated in the receiver’s native language. A number of Multinational Companies have entered India in the recent past. Originally it was trial and error for them in terms of the languages to be used. Recently they have been setting up procedures for the necessary languages to be used in different contexts. Languages used for communication between superiors and the middle level managers are different from the languages used between the middle level managers and the lower level of employees. In order to find out these trends, an empirical study was conducted among the respondents belonging to twelve different multinational corporations and the results are herein submitted in this paper. This paper has been divided into sections such as the introduction, the importance of local languages in India, a profile of the multinationals surveyed, the results of the study and the concluding remarks.