Globish and its discontents

Globish occurs in the news almost every day, in different guises. The news that Obama has authorised the hunting down and elimination of the al-Qaeda mastermind, Anwar al-Awlaki, highlights this Most Wanted Man's mastery of the internet, English, and international propaganda skills. Anwar al-Awlaki posts his jihadist sermons on the internet, using both Arabic and English. He is also said to namecheck US rappers and reach out, rhetorically, to potential Muslim sympathisers in the west. To me, this is a classic example of contemporary Globish, the part-linguistic and part-cultural use of Anglo-American resources. Once again, words (intrinsically neutral) acquire an explosive connotation in conjunction with current events.

I've always known that the English language is a hot-button issue, and two recent posts here and here only confirm that. Nor, by the way, does the English language have a monopoly of public, cultural anxiety. French, German, Russian and Spanish speakers will express linguistic-cum-cultural fears. Language is a lightning conductor for one's attitude to the state of the world, and the sense that everything is going to hell in a handcart. There's a parallel with US politics: Obama gets a lot of stick from the Tea Party crowd, but some of their complaint is a generalised rage against the state of the world, merely symbolised by a black president in the White House.

Some of the reactions to my posts on Globish fall into this category. And some of the commentary is an instinctive reaction to a new label, which I had anticipated. But I also detect – without much difficulty, because it's so explicit – something else: a geopolitical class division between some elite US and UK Anglo-English mother-tongue users and some possibly less privileged non-native English users. For the latter, the idea of "Globish" is so obvious, and so much part of their everyday experience, it causes virtually no comment. It's a lingua franca they are accustomed to, across a wide spectrum of usage. For the former, it is a silly, slick, almost meaningless term that does not answer to experience and seems to threaten the sovereignty of British and American Standard English.

A few clarifications: what Globish is NOT. It is not Basic English, or Esperanto. I part company with Jean-Paul Nerriere on his vocabulary of 1,500 words. For me, Globish describes the use of English (at varying levels of expertise) in situations where the local language fails to work for outsiders. Also: it is NOT a pidgin. That's a specific kind of language formed by the linguistically dispossessed (slaves on the Middle Passage, for instance, or South Sea islanders cut off from other cultural influences), and pidgins lead inexorably to creoles (as in the Caribbean). Globish is neither a pidgin nor a creole.

And it's not a dialect. That's my mistake. When I quoted Nerriere's "the worldwide dialect of the third millennium" this was an imprecise, and (I now see) confusing, citation. For me, "Globish" is, as I say above, part-linguistic, and part-cultural. It's a phenomenon that derives its inspiration from Anglo-American language and culture, but it now has a momentum that is independent of both US and UK.

One final correction: Globish may be, as I contend, a global phenomenon, but, like Latin before it, is vulnerable to change and decay. It won't be global forever.