Haider stopped using a word.

“Yes, I needed to be more direct with customers. I needed to tell customers the exact wait time before they could receive their chicken instead of vague expressions. In my country, we soften our expressions, such as ‘in a bit’ or ‘inshallah’. Here, customers want specific answers.”

Inshallah — God willing — is a soft commitment marker used to express hope, intention, or acknowledgement that the future is not entirely in one’s hands. Its intended function is humility. Its perceived function, in a Canadian restaurant, is evasion: a way of dodging responsibility or refusing to give a straight answer. Several participants deliberately stopped saying it at work and saved it for interactions with people from their own culture.

Twelve minutes, then. Not inshallah.

The puzzle

Nothing was lost operationally. The chicken arrives at the same time either way. What changed is that a man now edits a piece of his own language out of his working vocabulary, every shift, on purpose.

The faith and goodwill created by that word in one culture created confusion in another. Some non-Muslim customers were made uneasy by the religious connotation. Others heard sarcasm. The word did not change; the room did.

What the research found

Communication adaptation ran across the interviews. Nour described rebuilding the shape of her sentences: “In Syria, our communication style often involves adding stories and explaining context around the main point. When I came here, I intentionally learned how to be straightforward and direct in my language.”

She did not describe this as a loss. She described it as a skill, learned on purpose, to reduce ambiguity and manage the anxiety of unstructured conversation.

Elias made a subtler edit. He was being friendly to a customer in the way he had always been friendly:

“I was being friendly, asking her questions, smiling a lot. I was just being nice! But later my colleague told me she seemed uncomfortable. I think she thought I was flirting. In my culture, being warm and friendly is normal, but here, I learned I need to be more careful. I need to keep a more professional distance.”

He kept the goal — make the guest comfortable — and changed the method, because the old method was producing the opposite of the intended result. That is not assimilation. That is precision.

The body was doing this work too. Physical distance, hand gestures, eye contact, a hand on a child’s head, calling someone habibi — these produced real misunderstandings with Canadian customers. Yet these same behaviours were, to the participants, the vocabulary of high-quality service: what a caring person does for people they treat as their own. The misunderstandings were not about bad service. They were about two different ways of showing good service with a body.

And language cut both ways. Arabic generated instant credibility with Arab customers. An Egyptian participant described it: “The store receives many Arab customers who become excited when I speak Arabic to them. When Arab customers come, they feel happy if I switch to Arabic. We laugh, sometimes even talk about Egypt or Lebanon. Many of them come back, and they even ask for me.”

Rana, a Syrian childcare worker who struggled with English, found the same thing from the other direction: “Yes, one Syrian father came, very stressed, speaking little English. The others were struggling to understand him, but I spoke Arabic with him, explained everything. He couldn’t believe it when I spoke Arabic with him. Using our mother tongue helped us break the ice and communicate better. It is then when I discovered I could actually be more useful.”

Bilingualism, in these accounts, is not a deficit being compensated for. It is a professional tool that produces loyalty, repeat visits, and customers who ask for one worker by name.

Where it stops being adaptation

Some of what participants gave up was not asked for by the work. It was asked for by discomfort.

One participant’s manager requested he go by “Mo” rather than Mohammed, because it would make customers more comfortable. He was not comfortable with this. He used the nickname anyway. In the process he concealed his background, his religion and his culture at the counter of his own workplace. Others fielded jokes about pyramids and polygamy — ignorance dressed as humour. These were not abstract experiences of exclusion. They were specific moments in which a person’s identity was reduced to a stereotype.

There is a line between adjusting how you say something and being asked to stop being who you are. Adapting a phrase is skill. Losing a name is loss.

Why it matters

Adopting Canadian communication styles — dropping expressions like inshallah — shows that the pressure of ambiguity acts not just on procedures but on speech itself. It demonstrates the degree to which workers feel they must suppress parts of their cultural identity to be accepted.

An employer cannot legislate what a customer hears in a word. But an employer can decide whether a worker’s name is an inconvenience, whether a joke at a colleague’s expense is tolerated, and whether the ability to serve a distressed parent in his own language shows up anywhere in a performance review. Right now, in most systems, it does not.