In his new book, Globish, London-based author Robert McCrum portrays a world where the dominant power is not a country or a corporation but a language. He spoke to The Globe and Mail about how English has come to be the global medium - and why the Globish that results is a good thing.
Q: What is this Globish that the whole world is speaking?
A: The term was coined in 1995 by Jean-Paul Nerrière, a French businessman and linguist. For him, it means a spoken version of English used by non-native speakers, with a very limited vocabulary of 1,500 words. But I use Globish in a wider metaphorical sense: It's the globalized version of English as a foreign language, fuelled by global capitalism, global media and global politics. Look at the European Union: You find Czechs, Hungarians, Estonians using English as a way of doing deals in Brussels. They're not for a minute letting go of their tremendous nationalist fervour, but English is the language they'll default to.
Q: How did English come to be the world's language?
A: It really started with the end of the adversarial relationships of the Cold War, coupled with the great explosion of global capitalism in the nineties, which in turn was driven by the Internet revolution. The English language was decoupled from its imperial past and colonial past, and gained what you might call a supranational momentum: It can be used by anybody without any anxiety.
Q: But if it's closely linked with global capitalism, isn't that a way of taking sides?
A: English is less involved with power politics than it used to be. I contend that capitalism, whatever you think of it, is still more neutral than British and American power.
Q: What makes English so versatile and adaptable?
A: It expresses many different nuances of meaning and it's very streamlined: Its early history consisted of a succession of violent shocks to its linguistic structure. After the Norman conquest in 1066, the English language goes underground, and flourishes on the lips of ordinary people. It simplifies and becomes democratized at a very early stage.
Q: Is the simplicity of English in itself a good thing? George W. Bush's plain speaking seemed inherently deceptive if not undemocratic.
A: The better comparison might be Barack Obama. He speaks with tremendous clarity and his language is completely simple. Japanese children learn English by repeating Obama speeches. You couldn't have a more Globish figure in a sense: His origins are Kenyan, his mother came from Kansas, he was born in Hawaii, then grew up in Indonesia. And that gives him an ability and a desire to communicate to a broad number of people not necessarily from America.
Q: To its critics, Globish is just an international language of dealmakers, but you refer to English as a vernacular of emancipation. Why?
A: Because historically that's been the case. Look at the United States, where the language in itself was the medium for shaking off a foreign power. All the great revolutionaries of America saw it in that light. With the Green Revolution in Iran, English was used to convey the idea of freedom. Why weren't the protest signs in French, one might ask. Because French is very top down: Everything came from the academy, the aristocracy, it was always very authoritarian and centralized. English has always been bottom up.
Q: And yet you refer, rightly, to the American colonization of Canadian English. Is that a bad thing?
A: Well, there's not a lot you can do about it. And yet Canada at the language level strikes me as the rainbow nation. Your policy of allowing every culture to have its own expression is extremely mature and sensible and will yield a very distinctive culture. In Britain, one encounters a real hostility to the idea that the mother tongue is being watered down by immigration, by multiculturalism. But you've chosen to be a part of a world community. And if there's more communication, there might be less misunderstanding.
Q: World peace is great, but won't it be harder to develop great literature, say, when the dominant means of communication is this stripped-down commercialized lingua franca?
A: Until some great writer comes along who wants to use it. All it requires is a Shakespeare or a Mark Twain.
Q: Yet most of the time, doesn't the built-in simplicity of Global English just lead to internationalized dumbing-down - call-centre chatter and aimless text messaging?
A: For every dumb thing you see or hear, there are also incredible numbers of elevated conversations too. You can find whatever the opposite of dumbing down is - dumbing up - going on all over the place. Every time you open a laptop, you have this incredible global reach: Bright ideas can now be expressed in a sophisticated way at a massive level.