It's back… or is it?
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Jean-Paul Nerrière's "Globish" hits the media again, this time because Robert McCrum is using his space at the Guardian to push a new book with the same title. According to McCrum, "the globalisation of English, and English literature, law, money and values, is the cultural revolution of my generation" ("How English erased its roots to become the global tongue of the 21st Century", 5/9/2010).
The last time I posted about Globish ("Another day, another reprinted press release", 4/24/2005), I complained that the International Herald Tribune uncritically reprinted a nearly contentless press release promoting Nerrière's books and other products. McCrum's book excerpt in the Guardian is quite different — it's chock full of what looks to me like a lot of mutually incompatible information, opinion, and analysis, most of it old news being passed off as the new new thing.
McCrum starts off by telling us that in the early 1980s, when he wrote The Story of English for the BBC and PBS, they concluded that "English, like Latin before it, was already showing signs of breaking up into mutually unintelligible variants" — but "We were, of course, dead wrong".
Much of his evidence for changing his mind, curiously enough, is a list of local hybrid varieties like Konglish, Manglish, Singlish, and Bollywood English, all of which could have been found (with or without their current names) in the early 1980s, if McCrum had looked for them. For decades, and even for centuries, such varieties have been flirting with mutual unintelligibility, and indeed have often consummated the relationship. The social context is somewhat different, but the dynamics are familiar from the history of pidgins, English-based and otherwise, during the 17th to 20th centuries — and in fact, many of today's local hybrid Englishes have roots that go back that far.
But McCrum's take on "Globish" goes beyond code-switching and the development of pidgins and creoles. It's a sort of conceptual stew-pot, into which he tosses "Jafaikan" slang, the influence of American movies and music, the Chinese "Crazy English" franchises, the English of EU bureaucracy, the Royal Shakespeare Company's world tour, and a hundred other things whose only real connection is that they have something to do with the use of English around the world.
What does all this have in common with Nerrière's rebranding of Basic English as a family of language-instruction products with a paradoxically anti-anglospheric vibe? Nothing, as far as I can tell, except that McCrum liked the word "Globish" for the title of his book, and was stuck with the fact that Nerrière has trademarked the name for a product line that overlaps a bit with the jumble of topics that McCrum wanted to write about. So he sticks Nerrière in — about 2/3 of the way through the column:
In 1995, Nerrière, who had noticed that non-native English-speakers in the Far East communicated more successfully in English with their Korean and Japanese clients than competing British or American executives, formulated the idea of "decaffeinated English" and, in a moment of inspiration, christened it "Globish". His idea quickly caught on. In The Last Word, his dispatches from the frontline of language change, journalist Ben Macintyre writes: "I was recently waiting for a flight in Delhi, when I 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 do I realise that they were speaking "Globish", the newest and most widely spoken language in the world."
For Nerrière, Globish starts from a utilitarian vocabulary of some 1,500 words, is designed for use by non-native speakers, and is currently popularised in two (French-language) handbooks, Découvrez le Globish and Parlez Globish. As a concept, "Globish" is now quite widely recognised across the European Union, and is often referred to by Europeans who use English in their everyday interactions.
In 2007, having read about Jean-Paul Nerrière in the International Herald Tribune , I interviewed him in Paris. He turned out to be a delightful Frenchman, with quixotic ambitions not only for global fraternity but also for the preservation of the French language. "Globish", he told me over a steak frites in a little restaurant opposite the Gare du Nord, "will limit the influence of the English language dramatically."
I'll read McCrum's book, in the hope that it's better than this excerpt suggests. But I'll make a suggestion in advance: if you're interested in things of this kind, and haven't already read Nick Ostler's Empires of the Word, you should do so right away.
minus273 said,
May 11, 2010 @ 10:48 am
>> and is often referred to by Europeans who use English in their everyday interactions.
Wow!
Stephen Jones said,
May 11, 2010 @ 12:35 pm
It's the 'Observer', not the 'Guardian' though they both belong to the same company and use the same web site. The Observer is a trashy once-respectable broadsheet with a completely different editorial staff and set of contributors.
The comments are almost all trashing the article, which is encouraging.
Stephen Jones said,
May 11, 2010 @ 12:43 pm
The guy must actually be going for a global record in plugging his own book. There are four other weekly articles plugging his own book (all presumably equally asinine).
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2010/apr/20/everyone-speaks-globish
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2010/apr/12/globish-discontents
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2010/apr/06/everyone-talking-globish-robert-mccrum
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2010/mar/29/globish-international-language
Ryan Denzer-King said,
May 11, 2010 @ 1:37 pm
It's pretty cool that he can accurately process Globish even though it doesn't have any grammar or structure. Take that UG!
John Cowan said,
May 11, 2010 @ 2:09 pm
I fear you have been guilty of selective quotation from the McCrum article.
You say:
But McCrum says:
That is to say, McCrum and his colleagues were dead wrong to suppose that the 1980s were the peak of the power and influence of English, not dead wrong to suppose (as your version suggests) that English was breaking up into mutually intelligible variants.
[(myl) You're right that Mr. McCrum says many different things in that story, and that the business about breaking into mutually unintelligible variants was (on his current account anyhow) how The Story of English suggested that the global influence of English would decay. But I was right, I believe, to note that he does repudiate this whole story of decline-by-break-up with a line of argument that paradoxically relies on the continued existence of many local varieties of hybridized English, all of which (even more paradoxically) already existed at the time that The Story of English was made.
I freely admit that neither his account of the earlier decline-by-break-up story, nor his account of its repudiation, make much sense to me, at least as they're presented in this excerpt from his book. And since I didn't understand what he said, I may well have gotten it wrong.]
Nanani said,
May 11, 2010 @ 9:10 pm
This reminds of a joke I have often heard from the ESL crowd, which concludes that the world's most commonly spoken language is in fact "Broken English".
J. Goard said,
May 12, 2010 @ 3:55 am
@Nanani:
Yeah.
It sure is interesting how your perspective on language teaching, multilingualism, and language contact changes when when you dump linguistic nativism and the competence/performance distinction. If the main reasons we have "native" language have to do with the child's learning environment, frequency of exposure, motivation and social scaffolding, together with the evolution of languages toward greater learnability by human brains, then nonnative language stops looking like "broken" anything. It is just not as deeply entrenched, as thoroughly trained.
Mike Unwalla said,
May 12, 2010 @ 7:06 am
@Mark "… McCrum liked the word "Globish" for the title of his book, and was stuck with the fact that Nerrière has trademarked the name for a product line that overlaps a bit with the jumble of topics that McCrum wanted to write about."
Many people state that 'Globish' is a registered trademark. However, to the best of my knowledge, 'Globish' is not a registered trademark. Today, I searched 2 applicable websites.
I looked on the Globish website (http://globish.com/?page=terms). The 'Trademarks' section does not state that 'Globish' is a trademark.
I searched the EU trade mark database (http://oami.europa.eu/CTMOnline/RequestManager/en_SearchBasic). The search shows that 'Globish' is not a registered EU trademark.
'Globish' is one term for the idea of simplified English for international communication. Other practitioners use terms such as 'global English', 'international English', 'internationalised English', and 'worldwide English'.
[(myl) Thanks! I should have checked, rather than accepting the assertion of a newspaper article. It remains true, at least, that M. Nerrière offers a wide variety of goods and services under this name, and it would therefore be strange to appropriate it as the title of a book, with a partly-overlapping meaning, without mentioning Nerrière's enterprises.]
mollymooly said,
May 12, 2010 @ 11:52 am
"And since I didn't understand what he said, I may well have gotten it wrong."
Perhaps he was writing in a different dialect of post-English.
David Hon said,
May 28, 2010 @ 3:34 pm
I've had occasion to check out the "Globish" trademark as well. “Globish” is registered as a trade mark in France under the registration number 02 3 198 650. This registration extends to all the countries with which France has an intellectual property agreement. The purpose was to avoid people using the word “Globish” for things that would misrepresent the concept, or damage its image. I.A. Richards trademarked Basic English for the same reason.
Nicholas Ostler said,
June 4, 2010 @ 5:47 am
Thanks for the unsolicited recommendation, Mark. In fact, I've just finished a book which is closer to McCrum's theme (called "The Last Lingua Franca", and due out in November). As a result, I have some sympathy for him, though I have resisted the temptation to refer to Globish. I think it's ill-defined, as I sense you do too. But I do think it's worth trying to distinguish International English (which I think is ultimately doomed) from native-speaker English (which certainly isn't). Is that what you meant, J. Goard and Nanani? The fact is that miscellaneous foreigners have been conspiring to communicate using (fragments of) some other people's language throughout history; Greek, Aramaic, Latin, Persian are just four examples from close to home, Jingpho, Wawa, Tupinamba from further afield. They're useful for a time, but then the need goes away, and so does the utility language. This is what I see as the verdict of history – but undoubtedly the triumphalist English dog will have his day – which happens to be now.
Mike Unwalla said,
September 13, 2010 @ 11:42 am
@David: “Globish” is registered as a trade mark in France under the registration number 02 3 198 650.
Thank you for your clarification. I apologise for my mistake.