Language skills and international performance: theoretical framework and research questions

The paper investigates the relationship, surprisingly often forgotten by the literature, between firms' language skills and their international performances. After having contextualized the concept of language within the broader concept of culture, the paper introduces language's characteristics and the functions from the point of view of an internationalized firm. The concepts of language skills and language needs are then defined underling the fact that firms' language needs are determined by the number and the characteristics of the markets of interest as well as by the internationalization strategy adopted. These theoretical concepts and the results of the empirical literature are synthesized into a specific framework from which we deduct a body of research questions to be answered with future ad hoc research. The framework and the research questions are proposed taking the perspective of the Italian SMEs opening to the international markets mainly through import or export strategies.