|
MED Magazine - Issue 59 - October 2010 Book
Review The use of English as a global language is something of a hot topic at the moment – see for example, Adam Kilgariff’s recent post on the Macmillan Dictionary blog about English as a Lingua Franca (ELF), and the responses to it. Robert McCrum’s new book Globish traces the development of English as a – or even the – global means of communication for the 20th and 21st centuries, and analyses its causes and possible consequences. English comes third on the list of languages with the most native speakers, after Mandarin Chinese and Spanish. However, estimates of the total number of people who use English vary so widely that it is hard to make any sense of them: the blurb on the back of McCrum’s book gives a figure of four billion people, or around two-thirds of the world’s total population, using English 'in some form', but this is vastly bigger than other estimates, ranging from between 500 million to two billion users overall. I suppose it depends what you mean by 'users' and 'in some form'. What is indisputable is that if a group of people from different countries with different mother tongues come together for business or pleasure, English is likely to be their means of communication, regardless of whether the group includes a native speaker or not. The main questions addressed by Globish are: 'why?' and 'what kind of English?'. In an attempt to answer the question 'why', McCrum spends a large part of the book tracing the history of English, from its remote origins among German tribes, to its current position as the dominant language of the Internet, international business and politics, and popular culture. The story of how British and then American political and cultural power spread English around the globe is a familiar one, and it is well told here. More interesting is the question of what will happen to the language as American global dominance gives way to rising powers such as China, India, and the countries of Latin America. McCrum’s answer is that English has already broken free of its territorial roots and will continue to develop as a global means of communication, independent of the fortunes of the countries where it originated. This brings us to the most interesting sections of the book, the ones which deal with the question 'what kind of English?'. The term Globish is borrowed from the name given by a French former-IBM executive, Jean-Paul Nerrière, to a simplified version of English which he devised after noting that non-native speakers found it easier to communicate with one another using a limited version of English. There is nothing particularly new about this: Basic English was devised back in the 1930s as a tool to aid the learning and teaching of English; learners’ dictionaries use a restricted vocabulary and simple grammar to explain meanings, and highlight the most basic and useful words in the language. Nerrière told McCrum that he expected Globish, which he described as 'decaffeinated English', to 'limit the influence of the English language dramatically', eventually replacing English itself as the global means of business communication. Yet McCrum seems to mean something rather different by the term Globish as he uses it in his book. Looking at the ways in which English is used as a means of communication in countries from China to Iraq, and from Greenland to Rwanda, he describes, not some flattened, simplified, 'decaffeinated' version of the language, but rather a flexible and adaptable tool that millions of users around the world can shape to their own purposes. Speaking as someone who finds the prospect of a decaffeinated language as dispiriting as that of a decaffeinated drink, I was rather cheered by this conclusion. Globish: How the English Language Became the World’s Language Want to shop for this book or others like it? Click here to get started. Copyright © 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited |