Globish: How the English Language Became the World’s Language by Robert McCrum, 2010, Viking Press, London.
For better or worse, English is the pre-eminent language of global capitalism, of the Internet, of popular culture and international relations. One of the principal reasons for Ireland’s popularity as a destination for migrant workers and students is the possibility of living among native English speakers who have the reputation for facility with the language. I myself taught a course on Anglo-Irish literature to foreign students for several years. Poles, Chinese, Nigerians, Pakistanis — everyone, it seemed, wanted to learn English.
In his book, Globish: How the English Language Became the World’s Language, Robert McCrum examines the medium of ‘Globish,’ as identified by a former IBM executive, Jean-Paul Nerriere. He coined the term based on his observations of Asian workers who were able to successfully communicate with one another as non-native English speakers in a truncated form of English.
Globish consists of a vocabulary of about 1,500 words, eliminates idiom and vernacular, and provides a simple syntax that minimises the number of clauses in a sentence.
Teaching a course on Irish literature gave me a chance to engage with young men and women from all over the world. The students I taught, in a classroom of the Museum Building at Trinity College in Dublin, were a hodge podge of different backgrounds and nationalities. They ranged from the son of a teacher in Gdansk to the daughter of a fireman in Boston, from the son of an army officer in Nairobi to the daughters of a pediatrician in Kuala Lumpur. They had two things in common, an interest in language and a love of books, two sentiments I reciprocated heartily.
Although the standard of spoken and written English among the students was variable, all had a modicum of English, certainly enough to get by, a Globish standard if you will. So when I knew that some of the non-native English speakers were having difficulty what I did, subconsciously, was to prepare ‘Globish’ lectures in which concepts were explained using relatively simple terminology. Local vernacular, which I used to give students a flavour of Irish writing, was either eliminated or dealt with cautiously. One of the major issues, however, was the translation of Irish idioms or slang terms, particularly in the novels of James Joyce and Flann O’Brien.
Sometimes, however, the students picked up their own local vernacular from the streets of Dublin. I remember on one occasion trying to explain one of Joyce’s particularly difficult passages in Ulysses. After a solid 20 minutes of me speaking, when I became very conscious of the entire class, even the native English speakers, getting increasingly lost in translation, I finally finished my explanation and asked what they all thought. The classroom was silent until a teenager from Krakow named Piotr — whose English was very limited indeed — looked up and said “ah Jaysus” in a perfect imitation of a working-class Dublin accent. The class descended into an uproar of laughter.
Robert McCrum’s book looks at that very generation of literature students who increasingly use English as a means of expression. McCrum examines how English spread throughout the globe in tandem with the spread of the British Empire and how, in fact, English was one of the principal weapons in the cultural arsenal of colonialism. Despite this, he argues that rather than being a tool of oppression this new form of English, Globish, is a potentially liberating phenomenon. He suggests that it allows cross-border communication using modern technologies enabling cultural and intellectual exchanges to take place between people who would otherwise never have the chance to interact or exchange ideas. “Language becomes more than just an essential means of communication; it embodies a contemporary aspiration, expressing a willingness to innovate with new ideas, to adapt old uses and to enfranchise new people,” he writes.
However, this highlights a central problem with McCrum’s argument, namely that Globish is a relatively limited and limiting mode of expression. It is tied quite explicitly to the economic arena of trade, finance and global capitalism. As useful on a pedestrian, everyday level as it is, Globish lacks the vocabulary of political or cultural modes of expression. Nerriere argues that Globish will retard the spread of English and will ultimately render it useless as a global language.
History is full of pidgin languages that emerged as a stop-gap for people from disparate groups to communicate. These pidgins are usually linked to specific purposes, such as trade. Ireland’s colonial past and its problematic relationship with its geographical neighbour Britain in general, and the English in particular, left many legacies. Probably the most lasting legacy is the English language, which my visiting students were so intrigued by. Posing and answering questions about Joyce and Flann O’Brien, Beckett and Elizabeth Bowen, I was reminded that visitors wanted a far deeper engagement with Ireland and Irish culture than a phrasebook could possibly provide.
Perhaps they only wanted to get on in life, perhaps they saw learning English as a path to career advancement. A Chinese colleague once told a friend of mine that she viewed English as a tool to make money. But all of these students of English wanted to learn and to know, and not simply to get by. As a simplified and utilitarian variant of English, Globish is unlikely to have the lasting impact of its parent language or to give its users what they want in the long term out of any language.
A writer and teacher in Dublin, Garry Prendiville founded SpeakWrite Media and is the editor of The Moth and the Candle.
Above, Arnaldo Pomodoro’s ‘Sphere within a Sphere’ at the Museum Building, Trinity College, Dublin. 2010 photograph by Javi Masa of Sevilla, Spain.
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Whatever the fate of Globish (and I’m not convinced it exists or should exist), in my view more attention should be paid to Esperanto, a language specifically designed for international communication.
I’ve used it on my travels for many years.
What do you think?
Bill Chapman
Wales
Bill,
good to hear you’re using Esperanto. Globish definitely exists. Peter Hessler writes about “Special English” in his book on China, “Oracle Bones,” and refers to a summary page on the Voice of America website, http://www1.voanews.com/learningenglish/about-us/
The great thing about obtaining a 2,000-word vocabulary in English or any another language is that it’s just a starting point. No one plans to be there forever, but at 2,000 words, or even less, you can actually communicate.
Bob Page
Bill,
Many thanks for your comments. To respond to your question I think Esperanto is an extremely interesting idea as an idea but I wasn’t actually testing the merits of the phenomenon of ‘Globish’ as a language because it isn’t one. Not at least according to most definitions of what constitutes a language. Rather I was looking at it as a cultural phenomenon in which non-native speakers evolved seemingly organically as an attempt to interact more in a more sustained way with the dominant political, cultural and economic Anglophone world structures.
This is most certainly not an attempt to endorse Globish, nor English as McCrum does repeatedly in his book, rather I highlight the limitations in personal, emotional and intellectual terms of pidgin languages like Globish. They, and it, do serve a purpose but it is a purpose which is perhaps a short-term solution to the immediate problem of cross-cultural understanding. As Bob said in his response above with 2000 words you can communicate and make yourself understood but I wonder how much you can say and would it be worth saying?
As to whether it ‘should’ be used, I suppose that depends on how one views the spread of the English language over the course of the last 5 centuries. Some would see it as a threat to their cultural mores and customs and I have some sympathy with that outlook. However, if my study of literature has taught me anything it is that language, identity and even culture itself is contested, fluid and dynamic. These forms change and shift over time. Language is one of the most excitingly dynamic areas of human existence and although changes in language may not always be to our individual tastes I find a great deal of comfort in the fact that the spontaneous emergence of something like Globish means that humans can find a way themselves to adapt to a perceived problem without a programmatic top-down imposition of rules and regulations.
I was interested to read that you have used Esperanto on your travels and would very much like to know more. Were there particular countries where it was more useful than others? Have you spoken it all of your life?
This is a topic that interests me as a translator, as I find that a lot of Chinese-English / English-Chinese translation ends up coming out as a flat “translatese” rather than as something that really sings in its new language. The mention of Flann O’Brien — a hero of mine — is like catnip to me, especially as I’ve been idly working on translating a couple of scenes from his novel An Beal Bocht (translated into English as The Poor Mouth) into Chinese, and have had a very hard time replicating the stiff circularity of his prose in Chinese.