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After taking an in-company e-learning course to help native English speakers communicate better with non-native speakers, Barron slowed down his pace of speaking and edited his “American speak” to avoid jargon and idioms that don’t translate globally.

“That e-learning exposed me to the thought that maybe people could not process my verbal information as quickly as I thought they were,” says Barron, who is now the company’s senior learning and development consultant for international operations, in Schaumberg, Illinois.

“Another takeaway was avoiding the use of sayings,” he says. “For example, a saying like ‘That dog don’t hunt’ which means ‘That’s probably not that good of an idea’. That’s a very southern American saying that people didn’t understand.”

He also filtered out references to baseball and football and changed his writing style. Instead of contractions like ‘can’t’, ‘don’t’ and ‘doesn’t’, he writes the phrases out in full.

Barron is one of a small but growing number of native English speakers recalibrating how he uses his mother tongue.