A language with no native speakers
Nobody grew up speaking this. Every fluent speaker in the room acquired it late, on purpose, and can remember doing it.
I took the accounting degree at Telfer between 2016 and 2020, which was two years after I had already started doing the work in Ottawa practices. So I learned the vocabulary twice, once in the order the job needed it and once in the order a curriculum needed it, and the two orders are not the same. They never converged either.
Somewhere in there I noticed something about the field that I have not been able to unnotice. Nobody speaks it natively. Not one person in any meeting I have ever sat in acquired accrual, provision, materiality or recognition the way they acquired the word for water. Everybody in the room learned it as an adult, deliberately, and most of them sat an exam on it.
There is no other language I use where that is true of every speaker at once.
What that does to a room
Three things, all of which I mistook for something else at the time.
The first is dialect. Five Ottawa practices taught me five slightly different versions of the same vocabulary. Not disagreements about the standards, which are written down. Disagreements about the words around the standards: what counts as a working paper, what a schedule is, which things get called a review. Every place has a house dialect and every place believes its dialect is the plain one. I spent an embarrassing amount of my early twenties assuming a new firm’s phrasing was sloppiness rather than accent.
The second is that it has no informal register. Every natural language has a kitchen version, a version you use when precision does not matter and nobody is listening closely. This one does not, because nobody ever speaks it outside work. There is no relaxed mode to drop into when you want to say something roughly, which means there is no way to signal that you are being approximate except to leave the vocabulary entirely and sound like you have stopped being serious.
The third follows from the second, and it is the one that took longest. A great deal of finance communication is defensive, and it is defensive in the specific way second language speech is defensive. Hedged, formulaic, reaching for the stock phrase instead of the plain one. I used to read that as insecurity, or as people hiding behind jargon.
The safe phrase, and why passing it on fails
It is not insecurity. It is a rational response to the situation, and I did the same thing without noticing.
When the standard is external and written down, and the cost of a wrong word can be a restated figure or a redone file, the safe move is to use the phrase you have seen survive review. That is exactly what a careful second language speaker does. You reach for the construction you have heard a native use rather than composing something fresh, because a fresh sentence is a sentence nobody has checked.
The cost is that the writing gets worse as the stakes rise, which is the opposite of what you would want. The stock phrase is safe and imprecise, and it carries the appearance of rigour while saying less than a plain sentence would.
The other thing I had wrong was about teaching it. Because everybody acquires it late and on purpose, I assumed it would be straightforward to pass on. Say the word, give the definition, done.
It does not work that way, and the reason is the same one that makes a second language hard. People acquire the word long before the concept, and the word is perfectly usable in the meantime. Somebody can deploy a term correctly in a sentence for two years while holding a model of it that is quietly wrong, and nothing in ordinary conversation will surface the gap, because the sentences come out right. It only shows up when they have to apply it to a case nobody has shown them.
The tell
Here is how you know it is a second language for everyone.
Ask a room full of finance people about a specific term and someone will tell you where they learned it. The class, the file, the person who corrected them. Nobody can do that for ordinary words. You do not remember learning “chair”.
A whole profession that can date its own vocabulary is a strange thing to be standing in, and I only find it strange in the last minute of a long day.