The Language & Competitiveness Project

Welcome to The Language and Competitiveness website. This project was conducted with funding from The UWI-Trinidad and Tobago Research and Development Impact Fund, which is intended to “support projects that address pressing development challenges and that will achieve recognizable and substantive impact in the short to medium term”. We feel that this project which bears the full name, “Language and Competitiveness: Positioning Trinidad and Tobago for Sustainable Development” fits neatly into this category.

The main purpose of the project was to conduct original, indigenous research which explored the links between foreign languages and intercultural communication and competitiveness. Although competitiveness is becoming a buzzword in Trinidad and Tobago, it is often viewed as a purely economic phenomenon and thus primarily bolstered by research in the social sciences.

This project added a humanities dimension to investigations on economic competitiveness.The Language and Competitiveness project aligns with research done in the EU and UK which shows how languages and intercultural communication boost economic competitiveness.

The Language and Competitiveness project was divided into the following five sub-projects:

• Trading with China: Linguistic, Cultural and Sociological Factors in Doing Business with China
• Spanish-English Bilingual Children: Proficiency and Language Attitudes
• French Language, Culture and Competitiveness
• A Language Audit
• The Implementation of a Language Management Strategy