“The folks in the US should do it,” he said. “We can write the content, but they should do the review. They’re a native English speaker after all.”
Sigh. Another person who thinks that I’ll never be as good in my job as someone with a different passport. And in my workplace, no less.
It’s not like this particular coworker thinks that I’m a bad writer. To him, it’s common sense that I simply cannot and never will be able to be as good as a native English speaker.
A little background: I come from Belgrade, Serbia and I work as a Product Copywriter for an international company. I started learning English when I was 7 years old and I got my Cambridge Certificate of Proficiency in English (CPE) in 2010. This literally means that I can teach English in countries where it’s not a native language.
However, I still feel “less than” because my work is always under a particular kind of scrutiny because I’m not a native English speaker. Some of my coworkers question my word choices assuredly, although they’re not native speakers nor writers. Recruiters keep listing and prioritizing “native English speaker” as a job requirement, as if people around the world aren’t studying, speaking, and writing in English like nobody’s business.
So, how do you prove yourself as a UX writer when you’re not a native English speaker or speaker of the target language? Can you turn it around and thrive in this industry despite because of your origin? I talked to several comrades-in-arms to find out.
Let’s skip the obvious—I’m not here to say that you don’t need advanced language proficiency to be a writer. I don’t think we should scrap language assessments. But I do believe we need to question this job requirement or, at the very least, it’s phrasing. Because, what does it really mean to be a native speaker? What knowledge does it guarantee?
While native speakers have an intuitive understanding of their language, a command of spelling, grammar, and other linguistic rules is not a given. And even if it was, there is so much more to writing—and more to UX writing, to be specific—than formal rules.
“I think there’s a big misconception about the art of writing and language proficiency or, let’s call it linguistic mastery. I started as a copywriter in advertising and my very first creative director was not great with spelling or anything but conceptually, her ideas were extraordinary and there was a junior like me to fix the spelling mistakes. And that’s what she’s hired for, the problem-solving, where the consumer meets the brand. I feel like it’s the same for UX writing: we try to get the business goals and the users’ goals to meet somewhere in the middle through words, but that doesn’t mean that we need linguistic mastery. Don’t tell me Hunter S. Thompson or Kurt Vonnegut are masters of the English language. They know how to get a point across, to use a metaphor beautifully, but I doubt that they studied English,” Greta explained.
Greta van der Merwe is an experienced UX writer who has been living and working in Dubai for several years. Born and raised in South Africa, her first language is Afrikaans, but she considers herself a native English speaker because she has been surrounded by English her entire life. Still, she believes language proficiency is something that can be learned, improved upon, and thus positioned as a skill. “Everything they do in code is also in what they call “languages,” so you learn to understand C# or Java or whatever. No developer is a native, you weren’t born a developer, you learn it and you become good at coding.”
After all, the real fun starts when you know the rules. More often than not, due to the lack of space or to make a point, UX copy will require you to be flexible. “You were taught these grammar rules and you think you cannot break them, but there are cases in UX writing where you can do that,” Kaliya Aneva, UX writer at adidas, said. “I would say that that is a challenge for non-native speakers, because first you have to obtain grammar excellence and only th
