Abstract
The aim of the paper is to put the unquestioned use of English as a lingua franca and English as a foreign language, ELF and EFL, 1 on the agenda of the business ethics community. Since the positive functions of English as an enabler of communication are unquestionable and widely accepted, we mainly focus on potential negative functions, such as handicaps for non-native users of English, language discrimination risks, and on missed opportunities of multilingualism. In order to understand how much (or how little) a monolingual dominance of English is addressed in our own field of business ethics, we start with a literature search in three journals: the JBE, BEQ, and BEER (on the respective webpages of each journal combined with a search through ProQuest, we searched for "language", language barriers " , " translation " , and " dominant language " in the abstract and in any available key words. After a first hit of more than 2300 articles, we narrowed our research by linking the terms with " English ". We then read the abstracts of the remaining 367 papers with a vast majority of papers published in JBE (280 articles), followed by 72 papers in BEER and 15 articles in BEQ). The literature review is organized by subtopics: English as a lingua franca (ELF), Research communities and their language, Academic writing and publishing.