English Is the World’s Lingua Franca. But Is It Culturally Neutral?

A French person and a Korean person meet in Berlin. Neither speaks the other’s native language, so they fall in love in English.

This is increasingly common. Rates of intercultural marriages have increased from 3% to 17% since the 1960s due to ethnic diversity and a shift in social attitudes. In metropolitan areas, rates are even higher.

English has become a lingua franca, meaning a shared language used between people who do not have the same native tongue. In my research on intercultural couples, I became interested not only in the practicality of this, but in something more psychological:

What happens when a couple builds its intimate world inside a language that belongs natively to neither partner? Even further, does the mutual language that the couple chooses to communicate through carry the cultural attitudes, patterns, and beliefs within it? Pierre Bourdieu, a French sociologist (1991), argued that dominant languages transmit the social hierarchy baked into them.

In my writing, The Globalization of Love: Culture, Identity, and the Future of Mating, I explored English Lingua Franca, or “ELF couples” and this idea that language is more than a neutral bridge between cultures. Language carries history, values, metaphors, and assumptions about how people should relate to one another.

We often think of language simply as a vehicle for meaning: translate the sentence correctly, and the message arrives intact. But culture travels through language too.

English became globally dominant through several historical forces. British colonialism played a major role in spreading the language geographically. But in the modern era, American economic and cultural influence has given English another layer of power. After World War II, the United States became a major global force through economics, Hollywood, media, consumer culture, and later technology. We see this transmitted globally via American soft power.

Hollywood, television, social media, podcasts, Silicon Valley, dating apps, and popular psychology have helped export not only American English, but American ideas, ideals, and beliefs or attitudes about the self. And that is important for us to be aware of.

American culture places strong emphasis on independence, autonomy, self-expression, personal choice, and self-definition. In contrast, many collectivist cultures understand the self much more through family, community, reciprocity, duty, and relational harmony.

So what happens when people from different cultural backgrounds begin talking about love and relationships using language shaped within a highly individualistic culture?

This is especially interesting in intercultural couples. Two people may each bring their own cultural blueprint into the relationship, but American English becomes the bridge between them. That bridge can carry another cultural layer with it, like assumptions about what healthy communication looks like, what an independent adult should be, how much one “owes” family into adulthood, what privacy should look like, or how directly emotions should be expressed.

In exploration, I offered that intercultural couples often create a shared microculture that incorporates both partners’ original backgrounds. They negotiate language, traditions, expectations, family roles, intimacy, and identity together. I make a stronger point with the intercultural couples that I work with in the US not to abandon the culture of the partner who is from a different country. And it is easy to do so, even without careless intent.

In many ways, the intercultural couple becomes a mini laboratory for globalization.

Two cultural histories meet. English becomes the common language. And increasingly, American cultural ideas enter the room with it.

What I offer into this is the importance of preserving our roots as the world becomes more globalized and homogeneous. Identity is one of the universal themes we work with in therapy, and to have a good sense of Self, we need to not only know our history but continue giving it life.