Have you ever felt trapped in the unbroken loop of the circle-back? Maybe your bandwidth is strapped, your project’s goalposts have been moved, and you haven’t gotten to gain traction on your to-do list. Your team has faced just so many headwinds lately. Or tailwinds. Or maybe—just maybe—the corporate-speak of it all has you feeling like something’s been lost in translation.
A new report explains why workplace jargon has us all spinning our wheels (or, rather, expending a lot of effort without making much progress). The study, conducted by LinkedIn and Duolingo, surveyed 8,000 workers from eight countries about jargon we use on the job—and finds that globally, more than half (58%) of professionals think the people they work with use too much of it.
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But even if you’re acquainted with management-speak, you might not know just how far it’s traveled. English business buzzwords have crossed borders—and in a globalized corporate world, they’ve become commonplace even in nations that don’t count English as one of its official languages. According to the report, they’re weighing down workers in offices from Bangalore to Bogotá.
“If you need any proof of the status of English in the business world, you can look to how English buzzwords get borrowed wholesale into workplaces that otherwise use another language for communication,” says Dr. Hope Wilson, senior learning and language curriculum expert at Duolingo, in an email to Quartz. “For example, even though there’s a Japanese word meaning ‘budget,’ yosan, the English-borrowing ‘bajetto’ is the most commonly used piece of jargon in Japan. And English words like ‘feedback’ and ‘networking’ are some of the most frequently-used buzzwords in Brazil.”
The most common workplace jargon across eight countries
So what’s the jargon du jour in offices around the world?