Companies' Websites as Vehicles for Expressing Corporate Identity: A Case Study on the Use of English as a Lingua Franca

Business communication has recently acquired great importance, since increasing the target audience’s awareness of a company’s activities is perceived as one of the main factors which can help to determine the company’s competitive advantage and success. In addition, the wide spread of the World Wide Web has had a remarkable impact on company communication, in that it has turned the traditional one-to-many communication into a new real-time many-to-many dialogue.As a consequence, companies’ websites have become powerful public relation tools for promoting corporate identities. In fact, they can be used to issue mission statements, identify core values, promote ethical codes, stress social responsibility, allowing stakeholders to play more active roles in corporate governance (Christensen and Cheney, 2000).Nowadays, as more and more companies choose English as the lingua franca for internal and international communications instead of the headquarters’ language, employees and stakeholders alike are confronted with it, whenever corporate identity is transferred by means of corporate communications to a company’s multiple audiences. The present study focuses on corporate identity as it emerges from the analysis of a corpus of web-mediated texts released by several European companies which have chosen English as the lingua franca for international company communications. The decision to concentrate on web-mediated texts relies on the assumption that these texts may prove quite revealing, both for what concerns the features of ELF that are displayed, and the corporate identity which emerges from their analysis. A qualitative analysis will be carried out, focusing on the most relied-upon and successfully employed grammatical constructions and lexical choices, in the attempt to establish whether systematic features of the ELF used can be identified, as well as the extent to which they contribute to shaping the corporate identity.The analysis will eventually prove that the ELF employed in the companies’ websites is subject to manifold influences, which include, for instance, the native mother tongue of the members of the companies, and the implications brought about by the use of the digital medium, but display, nonetheless, a general trend towards adaptation to the specific identity the company is willing convey to its multiple audiences.