Building rapport in BELF communication : solidarity strategies in business emails

In the globalized market, business professionals use emails to communicate with customers, suppliers, and even colleagues who may be based in any part of the world, employing English as a business lingua franca (BELF). Despite the goal-oriented nature of business communication, rapport is “an essential element in the building and maintenance of strong work relations” (Pullin 2010, 456), and the achievement of business goals may be “dependent to some extent on the establishment of relations” (Pullin 2010, 458). However, nurturing interpersonal relationships may be difficult in intercultural business interactions (Spencer-Oatey and Xing 2003), especially in the case of business emailing, whose main aim is the rapid fulfillment of the task at hand. Based on a corpus of business email exchanges amongst BELF users of different L1s, this paper proposes a classification of ‘solidarity strategies’ (Köster 2006) aimed at building and nurturing rapport in email communication despite the pressure of getting the job done. It is argued that being less concerned with issues of accuracy in the target language, BELF email writers seem to pay more attention to the pragmatic needs of business communication, including that of building trust and common ground.