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T O P I C R E V I E W
Sean
Posted - 04/04/2010 : 05:01:15Globish: the worldwide dialect of the third millennium
Posted by Robert McCrum Monday 29 March 2010 13.51 BST guardian.co.uk
More than a lingua franca, the rapid adoption of 'decaffeinated English', according to the man who coined the term 'Globish', makes it the world's most widely spoken language.
The House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee has just published a report Global Security: UK-US Relations whose headline conclusion (The "Special Relationship" is Dead) interests me. This, it seems to me, is potentially another milestone in the evolution of the phenomenon I've occasionally referred to on this blog as "Globish".
Full disclosure: for the past four years, I've been working on a book, Globish: How the English Language Became the World's Language, which argues that a seismic shift in the foundations of our lingua franca has transformed it from an expression of Anglo-American cultural sovereignty into a supra-national phenomenon, with its own powerful inner dynamic. Penguin Books will shortly publish this in the UK, and I'm on a state of alert for examples of Globish, because as I see it, this is a breaking story.
What is Globish? For me, it's not just linguistic, and it all began in 2005. In September that year, Jyllands Posten (the Jutland Post), a culturally influential Danish newspaper, published a sequence of satirical cartoons poking fun at the prophet Muhammad, which provoked riots in which 139 people died. Possibly the most bizarre response to the affair, which surfaced again in January 2010 with an assault on the home of the artist, Kurt Westergaard, was a protest by Muslim fundamentalists outside the Danish embassy in London. Chanting in English, the protesters carried placards with slogans such as "Vikings Beware!", "Butcher Those Who Mock Islam", "Freedom of Expression Go to Hell" and (my favourite) "Down with Free Speech".
This collision of the Koran with Monty Python, or perhaps of the OED with the Islamic Jihad, was the moment at which I began to reflect on the dramatic shift in global self-expression (I didn't have a word for it then) that was now asserting itself in this crisis, through a world united by the internet. What more surreal � and telling � commentary on the anglicisation of the modern world could there be than a demonstration by devout Muslims, in London, exploiting an old English freedom, and expressing it in the English language, to demand the curbing of the libertarian tradition that actually legitimised their protest?
Then, in 2007, still puzzling over the phenomenon of British and American English as an evolving lingua franca, I came across an article in the International Herald Tribune about French-speaking retired IBM executive Jean-Paul Nerriere, who not only described English and its international deployment as "the worldwide dialect of the third millennium" but also gave it a name.
In a posting in Japan in the 1990s, Nerriere made an important observation. He noticed that, in meetings, non-native English speakers were communicating far more successfully with their Korean and Japanese clients than British or US executives, for whom English was the mother tongue. Standard English was all very well for Anglophone societies, but out there in the wider world, a non-native "decaffeinated English", declared Nerriere, was becoming the new global phenomenon. In a moment of inspiration, he christened it "Globish".
Nerriere's idea caught on quickly within the international community. I wasn't the only one following its trajectory. The Times journalist Ben Macintyre described how, waiting for a flight from Delhi, he had overheard a conversation between a Spanish UN peacekeeper and an Indian soldier. "The Indian spoke no Spanish; the Spaniard spoke no Punjabi. Yet they understood one another easily. The language they spoke was a highly simplified form of English, without grammar or structure, but perfectly comprehensible, to them and to me. Only now," he concluded, "do I realise that they were speaking 'Globish', the newest and most widely spoken language in the world."
That, surely, is just a description of what used to be known as a lingua franca? Not according to Nerriere. For him, "Globish" was a specific linguistic tool, which he formulated in two (French language) handbooks: Decouvrez le Globish and Don't Speak English, Parlez Globish. In these self-published volumes, Nerriere began to develop a "Globish" vocabulary: the 1500 essential words for international communication, and the idiom-free turns of phrase in which they might be expressed by the world's two billion non-native English speakers.
In 2007, I interviewed Nerriere in Paris. He turned out to be a French technocrat with an ambition not only for global fraternity (a word only the French can use without sounding ridiculous), but also for the preservation of the French language. "Globish will limit the influence of the English language dramatically", he told me. In other words, Globish was not just a lingua franca, it was a linguistic third force, and it was just coming into its own at the start of the third millennium. I didn't agree with some of Nerriere's ideas, but his fundamental insight was, I thought, highly significant, and could be applied to our understanding of what Winston Churchill called the English-speaking world.
In hindsight, this was my "Eureka!" moment. I knew from my work on The Story of English in 1985/6, that British English had enjoyed global supremacy throughout the 19th century in the days of empire. Then, broadly speaking, its power and influence had passed to the Americans in the 20th century (through the agency of two world wars). After that, during the cold war, Anglo-American culture and values became as much part of global consciousness as the combustion engine. From 1945 to 1989, hardly a transaction in the modern world was innocent of English in some form � but its scope was always limited by its troubled association with British imperialism and the pax Americana.
Now that seemed to be all in the past. Perhaps Nerriere was right. Things had changed. Was it not possible that, with the turn of the century, English language and culture were becoming decoupled from their contentious heritage, disassociated from post-colonial trauma? Was there a new cultural revolution at work: the emergence of English as a global communications phenomenon with a supra-national momentum that made it independent of its Anglo-American origins? You could almost express the idea in a formula: English + Microsoft = Globish.
Armed with this idea, I began to narrate a familiar tale: the story of English, from the point of view of a language that would eventually achieve this extraordinary pre-eminence, looking for the qualities and turning points that, with hindsight, would prove decisive in the making of Globish. (That, by the way, had become the title of my book, with the approval of Nerriere who was, I think, only too pleased to see his concept get a wider audience, a broader narrative and some theoretical underpinning.)
So here's the sales pitch. Globish is not about the making of a 1500-word vocabulary, but about the way in which Indians, Chinese and many Africans are now turning to English as a liberating and modernising phenomenon (last year, the government of francophone Rwanda not only applied to join the British Commonwealth but also declared English to be the official language of the country).
At the same time, as well as exploring a decisive new chapter in international communications, Globish begins to identify the viral nature of this lingua franca, the qualities of the English language and its culture that make it so contagious, adaptable, populist and even subversive. It describes a process that echoes contemporary experience: a socio-cultural dynamic that is bottom-up, not top-down. That's the guiding intuition of Globish, and I'm hoping that my account of it in 2010 will strike a chord with you.
There's also a sense in which the narrative of Globish makes some important cross-cultural connections. Here, I pay tribute to Magna Carta and Bob Marley, VS Naipaul, Shakespeare and the Founding Fathers, but also The Simpsons, Coldplay and the author of Dreams from My Father. Globish analyses Twitter, Iran's green revolution and Slumdog Millionaire, and places them all in a new context: a Globish-speaking society.
From an internet perspective, the emergence of English as a global communications phenomenon which can celebrate a real independence from its Anglo-American roots is potentially decisive. That was why I was so interested in the Foreign Affairs Committee's report. As the UK becomes less hung up on the US dimension of its politics and culture, "Globish" will flourish internationally on its own terms. My own, rash prediction is that it is likely to be the linguistic phenomenon of the 21st century. Who knows what Winston Churchill would have made of that?
Posted - 04/04/2010 : 05:03:20 This makes sense to me. When speaking to someone in Africa / Indonesia / India etc I generally don't speak 'normal' English or I wouldn't expect to be understood. Without realising it I was probably speaking Globish.
