Glob-ish
Powered by the Internet and the global media, English
has evolved into the world’s language:
The alumni of the vast People’s University of China are typical of
the post-Mao Zedong generation. Every Friday evening several hundred
gather informally under the pine trees of a little square in Beijing’s
Haidian district, in the so-called English Corner, to hold “English
conversation.”
Chatting together in groups, they discuss football, movies, and
celebrities like Victoria Beckham and Paris Hilton in awkward but
enthusiastic English. They also like to recite simple slogans such as
Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign catchphrases-”Yes, we can” and “Change we
can believe in.”
This scene, repeated on campuses across China, demonstrates the
dominant aspiration of many contemporary, educated Chinese teenagers: to
participate in
Globish- The message is conveyed. presseuro.eu |
the global community of English-speaking nations. Indeed,
China offers the most dramatic example of a near-global hunger for
English that has brought the language to a point of no return as a
lingua franca.
More vivid and universal than ever, English is now used, in some
form, by nearly four billion people on earth-perhaps two thirds of the
planet-including 400 million native English speakers. As a mother
tongue, only Chinese is more prevalent, with 1.8 billion native
speakers-350 million of whom also speak some kind of English.
A populist tool
Contagious, adaptable, populist, and subversive, the English language
has become as much a part of the global consciousness as the combustion
engine. And as English gains momentum as a second language all around
the world, it is morphing into a new and simplified version of
itself-one that responds to the 24/7 demands of a global economy and
culture with a stripped-down vocabulary of words like “airplane,” “chat
room,” “taxi,” and “cell phone.”
Having neatly made the transition from the Queen’s English to the
more democratic American version, it is now becoming a worldwide power,
a populist tool increasingly known as Globish. The rise of Globish first
became obvious in 2005, when an obscure Danish newspaper called The
Jutland Post published a sequence of satirical cartoons poking fun at
the Prophet Muhammad.
The Muslim world exploded, with riots across Afghanistan, Nigeria,
Libya, and Pakistan; in all, 139 people died. But perhaps the most
bizarre response was a protest by fundamentalist Muslims outside the
Danish Embassy in London. Chanting in English, the protesters carried
placards with English slogans like ‘Butcher those who mock islam’;
‘freedom of expression go to hell’; and (my favorite) ‘Down with free
speech’.
This collision of the Islamic jihad with the Oxford English
Dictionary, or perhaps of the Quran with Monty Python, made clear the
dramatic shift in global self-expression asserting itself across a world
united by the Internet.
What more surreal-and telling-commentary on the Anglicization of
modern society than a demonstration of devout Muslims, in London,
exploiting an old English freedom expressed in the English language, to
demand the curbing of the libertarian tradition that actually
legitimized their protest?
I wasn’t alone in noticing this change. In 2007 I came across an
article in the International Herald Tribune about a French-speaking
retired IBM executive, Jean-Paul NerriŠre, who described English and its
international deployment as “the worldwide dialect of the third
millennium.”
NerriŠre, posted to Japan with IBM in the 1990s, had noticed that
non-native English speakers in the Far East communicated in English far
more successfully with their Korean and Japanese clients than British or
American executives.
Standard English was all very well for Anglophones, but in the
developing world, this non-native “decaffeinated English”-full of
simplifications like “the son of my brother” for “nephew,” or “words of
honor” for “oath”-was becoming the new global phenomenon. In a moment of
inspiration, NerriŠre christened it “Globish.”
No boundaries
The term quickly caught on within the international community. The
(London) Times journalist Ben Macintyre described a conversation he had
overheard while waiting for a flight from Delhi between a Spanish U.N.
peacekeeper and an Indian soldier.
“The Indian spoke no Spanish; the Spaniard spoke no Punjabi,” he
says. “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 do I realize
that they were speaking ‘Globish,’ the newest and most widely spoken
language in the world.”
For NerriŠre, Globish was a kind of linguistic tool, a version of
basic or so-called Easy English with a vocabulary of just 1,500 words.
As I saw it, however, “Globish” was the newly globalized lingua franca,
essential English merged with the terminology of the digital age and the
international news media.
I knew from my work in the mid-1980s on a PBS series called The Story
of English that British English had enjoyed global supremacy throughout
the 19th-Century age of empire, after centuries of slow growth from
Chaucer and Shakespeare, through the King James Bible to the
establishment of the Raj in India and the great Imperial Jubilee of
1897.
The map of the world dominated by the Union Jack answered to the
Queen’s English; Queen Victoria, in her turn, was the first British
monarch to address her subjects worldwide through the new technology of
recorded sound, with a scratchy, high-pitched “Good evening!” In this
first phase, there was an unbreakable link between imperialism and
language that inhibited further development.
In the second phase, the power and influence of English passed to the
United States, largely through the agency of the two World Wars. Then,
throughout the Cold War, Anglo-American culture became part of global
consciousness through the mass media-movies, newspapers, and magazines.
Crucially, in this second phase, the scope of English was limited by
its troubled association with British imperialism and the Pax Americana.
But the end of the Cold War and the long economic boom of the 1990s
distanced the Anglo-American hegemony from its past, setting the
language free in the minds of millions. Now you could still hate George
W Bush and burn the American flag while simultaneously idolizing
American pop stars or splashing out on Apple computers.
With the turn of the millennium, it appeared that English language
and culture were becoming rapidly decoupled from their contentious past.
English began to gain a supranational momentum that made it independent
of its Anglo-American origins. And as English became liberated from its
roots, it began to spread deeper into the developing world.
In 2003 both Chile and Mongolia declared their intention to become
bilingual in English. In 2006 English was added to the Mexican
primary-school curriculum as a compulsory second language. And the
formerly Francophone state of Rwanda adopted English as its official
language in 2009.
Bottom-up
In China, some 50 million people are enrolled in a language program,
known colloquially as “Crazy English,” conducted by “the Elvis of
English,” Li Yang, who often teaches groups of 10,000 or more, under the
slogan “Conquer English to make China strong.” Li Yang is part preacher,
part drill sergeant, part pedagogue. He gathers his students in football
stadiums, raucously repeating everyday phrases. “How are you?” he yells
through a bullhorn. “How are you?” repeats the crowd. “I’m in the pink!”
he responds. “I’m in the pink!” they reply-ironically, using an arcane
bit of Edwardian slang for “feeling good.” Li Yang has even published a
memoir called I Am Crazy, I Succeed.?
The viral nature of Globish means that it’s bottom-up, not top-down.
The poet Walt Whitman once wrote that English was not “an abstract
construction of dictionary makers” but a language that “has its basis
broad and low, close to the ground.” Ever since English was driven
underground by the Norman Conquest in 1066, it has been the language of
Everyman and the common people. That’s truer than ever today.
The fact is that English no longer depends on the U.S. or U.K. It’s
now being shaped by a world whose second language is English, and whose
cultural reference points are expressed in English but without reference
to its British or American origins.
Inconvenienced pedestrians |
Films like the 2009 Oscar-winning Slumdog Millionaire hasten the
spread of Globish-a multilingual, multicultural cast and production team
creating a film about the collision of languages and cultures, launched
with an eye toward Hollywood.
The dialogue may mix English, Hindi, and Arabic, but it always falls
back on Globish. When the inspector confronts Amir on suspicion of
cheating, he asks in succinct Globish: “So. Were you wired up? A mobile
or a pager, correct? Some little hidden gadget? No? A coughing
accomplice in the audience? Microchip under the skin, huh?”
Common linguistic denominator
Globish is already shaping world events on many fronts. During last
year’s Iranian elections, the opposition used Globish to transmit its
grievances to a worldwide audience. Cell-phone images of crude slogans
like ‘Get away England’ and ‘Free, fair voting now’, and innumerable
tweets from Westernized Iranians communicated the strength of the
emergency to the West.
In the short term, Globish is set to only grow. Some 70 to 80 percent
of the world’s Internet home pages are in English, compared with 4.5
percent in German and 3.1 percent in Japanese. According to the British
Council, by 2030 “nearly one third of the world’s population will be
trying to learn English at the same time.” That means ever more voices
adapting the English language to suit their needs, finding in Globish a
common linguistic denominator.
The distinguished British educator Sir Eric Anderson tells a story
that illustrates the growing life-and-death importance of Globish. On
the morning of the 7/7 bombings in London, an Arab exchange student
tried to take the Underground from southwest London to his daily class
in the City. When he found his station inexplicably closed, he boarded a
bus. During his journey his mobile phone rang.
It was a Greek friend in Athens who was watching the news of the
bombings on CNN. Communicating urgently in the Globish jargon of
international TV, he described the “breaking news” and warned that
London’s buses had become terror targets. As a result of this
conversation, the student disembarked from the bus. A minute later it
was destroyed by a suicide bomber, with the loss of many lives.
This is not the end of Babel. The world, “flatter” and smaller than
ever before, is still a patchwork of some 5,000 languages.
Native speakers still cling fiercely to their mother tongues, as they
should. But when an Indian and a Cuban want to commission medical
research from a lab in Uruguay, with additional input from Israeli
technicians-as the Midwestern U.S. startup EndoStim recently did-the
language they will turn to will be Globish.
Courtesy: Newsweekasia.com
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