The fate of English

Perhaps only a cosmopolitan Frenchman can see Yasser Arafat as the face of future English.  Jean-Paul Nerrière is a retired IBM vice president who has angered many of his countrymen by suggesting that a sort of pidgin English has now become the lingua franca of the world. Rather than fight it, he has advised Frenchmen (and every other nationality) to learn a subset of English he’s codified called globish.  The BBC describes Nerriere’s key insight into both the dominance of English and the need for a functioning subset:

Monsieur Nerrière is a retired French businessman who one day in the course of his work made a fascinating observation. In a meeting with colleagues from around the world, including an Englishman, a Korean and a Brazilian, he noticed that he and the other non-native English speakers were communicating in a form of English that was completely comprehensible to them, but which left the Englishman nonplussed.

He, Jean-Paul Nerrière, could talk to the Korean and the Brazilian in this neo-language, and they could understand each other perfectly. But the Englishman was left out because his language was too subtle, too full of meaning that could not be grasped by the others. In other words, Monsieur Nerriere concluded, a new form of English is developing around the world, used by people for whom it is their second language.

Nerrière’s globish site asserts that you can say most things using a vocabulary of 1,500 words or less. His website say that the

globalised version of English is now so common that Britons, Americans and other English-speakers should learn it too. “The point is that Anglophones no longer own English,” he told The Times in Paris. “It is now owned by people in Singapore, Ulan Bator, Montevideo, Beijing and elsewhere.” He says that in multi- national meetings, Anglo-Saxons stand out as strange because they cling to their original language instead of using the elementary English adopted by colleagues from other countries. Their florid phraseology and grammatical complexities are often incomprehensible, said Mr Nerrière, who added: “One thing you never do in Globish is tell a joke.

The inability to express jokes in globish is probably why, according to the BBC,  Nerriere regards the late Yasser Arafat as one of the prime examples of globish in action. This YouTube video shows Arafat speaking English shortly after the September 11 attacks. The Frenchmen who watch it may conclude that the bad news is that in the future everyone will speak English. The good news for the French is that all the English speakers will be doomed to sound like Yasser Arafat. But maybe things won’t work out that way at all. Instead of the emergence of one, simple English it is possible that dozens, even hundreds of very complex Englishes will emerge, all of who share a basic vocabulary and grammar.  There may be enough commonality for the different English speakers to understand each other without ever resorting to a simplified common vocabulary. Wikipedia lists dozens of English dialects, including Jamaican, Burmese, Indian, Pakistan, HongKong Englishes to name a few. This is in addition to many other pidgins which have arisen. In which case, maybe Edwin San Juan, not Yasser Arafat will be the sound of English in the future. (Here’s part 2 of the Edwin San Juan video).