A new type of English is becoming the dominant global language, a literary journalist has argued in a new book.
"Globish" is the new "lingua franca," according to Robert McCrum in Globish: How the English Language Became the World's Language.
McCrum, who edits the British newspaper The Observer and was previously Editor-in-Chief of the publisher Faber & Faber, says that while British English ruled the nineteenth century, and American English the twentieth, Globish dominates the twenty-first.
He describes the language as made up of about 1,500 phrases, with very few idioms and an excess of non-verbal gestures to compensate for lack of nuance.
"There is something intrinsic to English which is contagious, adaptable and populist. It is viral," he told the Reuters news agency in an interview.
He cites US President Barack Obama as the classic example of Globish. With Kansan, Hawaiian, Indonesian and Kenyan roots, Obama speaks in a way that is "universally intelligible."
"His slogan 'Yes We Can' works anywhere in the world," McCrum told Reuters.
The eclectic nature of the English language makes it ideal for adaptation as a new, universal language, he said – it has always been a "mashup," even in Shakespeare's day.
The moniker "Globish" was coined in the 1990s by former IBM executive Jean-Paul Nerrière for what he called "decaffeinated English," used effectively by non-native English speakers in the Far East.
McCrum predicts that Globish will overtake standard American English as the new worldwide language of communication.
In his book, he writes that as Globish transforms grammar and vocabulary, the English language will "make its own declaration of independence from the linguistic past."
23 May 2010
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