One of my first English students was a Pole who wanted to communicate with his Chinese business partners. “Why English?” I asked, “Why not Mandarin?” Well, he said, what if they did business with Indians, Italians or Azerbaijanis? What are they likelier to know? English or Mandarin? I suspect it helped that he didn’t have to struggle with Standard Chinese Phonology this way, too.
English is indisputably the global language. More than three times as many people speak English as a second tongue than speak it as a first. It is, as my student knew, the language of international business, and multinationals increasingly use it as a common corporate language to improve communication across diverse and complex organisations.
English is the main language of international tourism, being a required skill for employees in the hospitality sectors of nations from Thailand to Argentina. It is the language of international gaming. Once, when I was having Easter breakfast at a Polish friend’s house, I excused myself to go to the bathroom and his 11-year-old brother, who had said nothing up to that point, blurted out, “Good luck, we’re all behind you”, learned from playing online. The only other English word he knew was “headshot”.
With its ubiquity stemming from British imperialism and American popular culture, and its relative simplicity, the pre-eminence of English does not seem likely to change. Learning Chinese as a foreign language is becoming more popular but it is neither as common nor as widespread, and there seems to be no institutional drive towards challenging the status of English as the lingua franca. Even China’s neighbours in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations have English as their working language.
What native English speakers will see, however, is the diversification of the language as non-native speakers from different countries communicate and form patterns of speech. Young French, German and Italian people, for example, might have “Euro-English”, where shared misconceptions are baked into the language, like the overuse of the present continuous (“I am coming from France”). Indians already have “Hinglish”, a stew of Hindi and English which might become more widely spoken than English itself.
Millions of non-native speakers will add this local spice to a stripped-down form of the language along the lines of what Jean Paul Nerriere calls “Globish”. Globish is simplified English, reduced to its most functional elements. This, Nerriere says, is important to “bridge the communication gap” between different non-native speakers but also to ensure that English does not supplant their native languages. Globish can therefore be useful in business and tourism spheres without excessively diminishing the cultural importance of native tongues.
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