Feel like this nation is being overwhelmed with Spanish? Worried that Mandarin will take over the world? The truth is that English is the global language and will be for the foreseeable future:
But with interest in English around the world growing stronger, not weaker — stoked by American cultural influences and advertising, the increasing numbers of young people in developing countries and the spread of the Internet, among other factors — there are some linguists and others who say: why fight it? Instead, the argument goes, English, particularly the simpler form of the language used by most nonnative speakers, should be embraced.
“It's a lost cause to try to fight against the tide,” said Jacques Lévy, who studies globalism at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne and is a native French-speaker. English, he added, is just the latest in a line of global tongues. “It could have been another language; it was Greek, then Latin, French, now it is English.”
Of course, some people think the spread of English can somehow be managed and finessed, like this nutty Frenchman:
Jean-Paul Nerrière, a retired vice president of I.B.M., calls his proposal Globish. It uses a limited vocabulary of 1,500 words, taken from the Voice of America, among other sources, which can be put together clumsily to express more complicated thoughts. Little concern is given to the complexities of grammar, and he proposes that speakers of Globish say the same thing in different ways to make up for difficulties in pronunciation.
The typical conversation in Globish could be grating to a native speaker, but get the job done between, say, a Kenyan and a Korean trying to navigate a business deal or asking for help at the airport check-in. For nephew, there is “son of my brother/sister”; kitchen is “room in which you cook your food”; chat is “speak casually to each other.” Pizza is pizza, however, since Globish considers it to be an international term, like taxi or police.
Ann Althouse is smarter than the Frenchman:
Hmmm... well, I'm seeing in this article that "chat" is another one of the words that Iran saw the need to ban. I think the kind of crisp short words used in web-writing are going to spread and people won't confine themselves to a tedious word list that requires them to construct clunky phrases containing boring filler like "in which."
