[lg policy] One World, One Voice: Globish: How the English Language Became the World ’s Language

Sat Jun 19 16:12:44 UTC 2010

One World, One Voice
By ROY BLOUNT Jr.
GLOBISH

How the English Language Became the World’s Language

By Robert McCrum

I found it a pleasure to read Robert McCrum on the English language’s
development in, for instance, the 14th century: “After centuries of
repression, the recognition of ‘Everyman’ and the ‘true commons’ was .
. . expressed in the simple English words that hold good still.” By
the time he reaches the 21st century, however, our connection is
shakier.

McCrum is bullish on Globish: the reign of English as the world’s
lingua franca or default tongue, “the worldwide dialect of the third
millennium,” the language in which China trades with Zambia, the
language in which a Greek watching CNN phones a friend from the Middle
East to get him off the London bus he’s riding before it explodes.
English, the author argues convincingly in “Globish,” will not break
up into new languages and die, as Latin did, because it is sustained
by the Internet, global marketing, mass consumerism, instant
communications, international soccer, texting, and (McCrum is English)
cricket and the legacy of Winston Churchill.

The language has also been sustained by many “a nice irony”:

¶ When the British Empire was drastically reduced by the American
Revolution, the potential of the English language was enormously
expanded.

¶ As India was suffering under the Raj, it was also absorbing enough
linguistic and cultural Anglophilia to give it a big competitive
advantage over China today.

¶ When “the British Empire went to war against the kaiser and then
against Nazi Germany, dispatched its armies and navy . . . and also
evacuated its young ones from the cities,” the mother tongue’s
hegemony was bolstered because “the children of empire were prepared.
Years of colonial service from Calcutta to Hong Kong had schooled
successive generations in ‘maternal deprivation trauma.’ ”

¶ Cold-war propaganda “sowed the seeds of the world’s English in parts
of the world previously unreceptive to British or American cultural
colonialism.”

¶ And, as McCrum sees it, the “disdain for international agreements”
on the part of George W. Bush’s administration “had the vital effect
of decoupling the English language from what cultural conservatives
would always see as American imperialism.” Bushian detachment had a
positive effect because “a global information network, and a global
market, require a global language, but one that is not, overtly, the
instrument of empire.”

That last irony’s niceness rests upon considerable spin. “In the
absence of an American mission, apart from the almost meaningless ‘war
on terror,’ the world was left to get on with its own multifarious
business,” McCrum writes. But if the English phrase in question is
almost meaningless, then surely the business of putting vast resources
behind it, counterproductively, is no contribution to English’s
credibility.

McCrum concentrates on medium more than message. “Globish, a world
dialect, will be less a language, more a means to an end.” He quotes
the prime minister of Singapore: “Speaking good English does not mean
using bombastic words or adopting an artificial English or American
accent. We can speak in the normal Singapore tone, which is neutral
and intelligible.” McCrum jumps in: “Neutral and intelligible: this is
an exact description of Globish.”

In that case, Globish is a pipe dream. The form of Globish that most
people in Singapore speak is Singlish, a lively blend that I wish
McCrum had provided more than one brief example of. English as it is
spoken or written in Japan, China, France or, for that matter, between
Britons and Americans is at least as loaded and slippery as words of
romance or business or politics between people who went to high school
together. Even McCrum says, “Those who want to characterize Globish as
a kind of benign virus that has worked its way into every corner of
daily life must also acknowledge its imperial and colonial past.”

And yet he calls not only Globish but language in general
“intrinsically neutral.” This, I believe, is doctrine passed down to
students of linguistics so that they can look beyond words, which
resist abstraction, toward notions of universal grammar, which thrive
on abstraction. How does McCrum reconcile that tenet with all that he
has conveyed (in this book and in his earlier and in some ways better
one, “The Story of English,” written with William Cran and Robert
MacNeil) about the distinctive fiber, force, diversity and
adhesiveness of English? Here’s how: “The history of the world’s
English, however, puts it on the side of the individual confronting a
demanding new challenge about his or her place in society. Inevitably,
it is an imperfect solution, with many loose ends and much unfinished
business. But, it is precisely the imperfections of English that are
part of its enduring strength.” To me, that has the ring of corporate
P.R. prose.

Call me an old crank. But I’ll say this: I am not horrified to learn
that “all the world’s texters use ‘lol,’ ‘gr8’ and ‘u,’ ” whatever
their native thumbs. “Traditionalists,” McCrum affirms, “will deplore
the witty text rendering of Hamlet’s most famous line (2b?Ntb? = ?).”
We should be reassured, he says, that “there is, perhaps, no need to
panic.”

True that. I would even lose the “perhaps.” A single slash between the
first “b” and the “N” might work better than the first two question
marks, but no skin off my nose, or, I venture to say, Shakespeare’s.
What bothers me about what happens to the English in this book, as it
moves into the present and future, is not McCrum’s receptiveness to
new forms of English like textese. It is, for instance, this: “Texting
operates with quintessentially linguistic parameters: it is playful,
concise and universal.” Operates with parameters? Parameters that are
quintessentially linguistic? Parameters wherewith it is playful and
so on?

Maybe McCrum is being playful himself there, but I can’t see it. He’s
certainly not being concise, since the six words between “Texting” and
“is” serve only to muddle up a simple, if too sweeping, assertion. As
to “universal” — the only thing universal in communication is our
inability to say exactly what we mean.

But, speaking of playful, we can do better than this, from McCrum:
“Bollywood is to the suspension of disbelief what the Indian rope
trick is to Newtonian physics.” India’s wild and crazy popular movies
may make great demands on the suspension of disbelief, or richly
reward it, or defy the notion that art depends on it. The Indian rope
trick (aside from its having been made up, most likely, by The Chicago
Tribune in 1890) doesn’t do any of those things to Newtonian physics.

McCrum, in fact, provides evidence that the globalizing of English
will water it down, at least literarily:

“Such is the obsession with the transforming power of the marketplace
in the new China that the eager young booksellers I spoke to were
concerned to know more about likely British ‘best sellers.’ The idea
of a little book making its way through word of mouth and the quiet
accumulation of devoted readers is foreign to this generation of
English-language readers. Best-seller readers in China are Globish
readers. They are being willingly coerced by the soft power of a
global force, and by Globish prose, a universally accessible style and
story.”

Given recent number-crunching tendencies in American publishing, good
books are probably already being rejected as insufficiently Globish.

It’s easy to see how Globish benefits emerging go-getters abroad and
international corporations. That doesn’t mean it will be good for
readers who value more interesting English. “Microsoft + Dow Jones =
Globish,” McCrum writes. If that sounds promising to him, we are
speaking only roughly the same language.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/20/books/review/Blount-t.html?ref=world
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