Polite impoliteness? How power, gender and language background shape request strategies in English as a Business Lingua Franca (BELF) in corporate email exchanges

Abstract International business is increasingly conducted through the medium of English as a Business Lingua Franca (BELF). Yet, little known about interactional strategies in BELF, specifically internal written communications. Our study turns to this hitherto less explored area and investigates one most important speech acts context workplace communication, i.e. requests. The data under come from unique corpus 398 authentic emails produced by multilingual employees an international insurance corporation. Using combination corpus-linguistic discourse-analytical methods, we identify classify request formulated BELF users with ten diverse first-language (L1) backgrounds, assess how their choice pragmatic might be influenced lingua-cultural background well extralinguistic factors, notably email senders’ power position within corporate hierarchy gender. Across corpus, level directness was high, suggesting that prioritised ‘getting job done’. modulated complex interaction between crucial observation high-power chose more direct than low-power employees, but pattern