Last month, as volcanic ash drifted across the skies of Europe, I found myself in a van traveling from Dubrovnik to Antwerp with a Belgian, a German, a Turkish couple living in the Netherlands, a Russian studying in Dublin, a Chinese woman heading to Beijing via Amsterdam, and two Croatian drivers whose services we had hired. How did we communicate? In English, of course. That “of course” is the starting point for Robert McCrum’s book, an account of how English achieved its present status, framed by an argument about the present and future consequences.
Perhaps oddly given this framing, most of the book is devoted to tracing the development of English from the 5th century to the 20th century. This is a much-told tale, and McCrum presents the usual facts in the usual way, a combination of Boy’s Own adventure story (“the suspenseful narrative of a people and their successive empires coming out of nowhere to create a culture that — against all odds — has achieved lasting global consequence”) and breathless hagiography (“the indefinable genius ... of the English language has always been to adapt itself, like mercury, to every new contour”). It is Land of Hope and Glory recast as a hymn to the language.
But Globish belongs to a new post-imperial wave in which the story has been reframed to make it less Anglocentric. McCrum is one of several recent writers who argue that the latest and greatest achievement of English is to have transcended the legacy of empire. Today its bounds are set so wide that it can truly be said to belong to the world. While its triumph continues, it is no longer coterminous with the triumph of the English-speaking peoples. Some commentators even suggest that it may now be happening at their expense. That is the view of Jean-Paul Nerriere, the French businessman who coined the term “globish” in 1995. He had noticed that non-native English speakers in Asia found it easier to do business with one another than with native speakers. Globish was his name for the kind of English they were using: a “decaffeinated” version without complexity or cultural baggage.
Rather than duplicating the expressive functions of a mother tongue, globish meets our practical need for a universal “other tongue” — a simple, neutral, intelligible medium for cross-cultural communication. And as it spreads, Nerriere predicts, it will reduce the international influence of English and eliminate the advantage long enjoyed by its native speakers. If in future the world’s business is conducted in globish, native Anglophones, like everyone else, will find themselves obliged to learn it.
For McCrum, the political implications are profound: “Today, in every country struggling to participate in capitalist democracy, it is globish that provides the main avenue of advancement.” Authoritarian regimes that want the capitalism without the democracy will not survive in a world where, thanks to globish, “everyone has access to an unlimited supply of data which floats ... in the infinite reservoir of cyberspace.”
But this argument depends on conflating different kinds of global English. In interviews and comments McCrum has insisted that what he means by globish is a reduced auxiliary language with no native speakers, like the version promoted by Nerriere; but many of the examples he uses in the book concern the varieties spoken in postcolonial societies such as India and Nigeria, which do have some native speakers, serve a full range of communicative functions, and are not globally intelligible or culturally neutral. At times he even uses “globish” to refer to the language in which G8 leaders give international press conferences — though in fact this is simply English, used by non-native elites in a way that diverges minimally from native norms.
What is obscured when these distinctions are elided is the difference between a language’s currency and its value. The Chinese researcher who sat next to me in the van had written her doctoral thesis on something McCrum treats as strong evidence for his argument: the increasing importance of English in China. But while her research did confirm that proficiency in English was strongly linked to success in the new capitalist order, it also found that the English that paid dividends was an elite variety acquired through extensive education, which was therefore only accessible to a small and privileged minority.
This is the downside of linguistic globalization: It may help to level the playing field between nations, but it also exacerbates inequality within them. Knowing 1,500 words of English, or a vernacular variety whose currency is purely local, does not give you access to the riches of cyberspace, let alone to wealth and power. Nor is the language an avenue of advancement for the estimated 75 percent of the world’s population who do not speak any English at all. Pankaj Mishra, writing about India, suggested recently in these pages that inequality is the specter haunting global capitalism; English is part of that story too.
But the genre McCrum is writing in prefers to accentuate the positive. The triumph of English can have no limits and no downside, and the only proper response is celebration. A unique and special language with an indefinable genius ... Even when its story is rewritten for the global age, these old cliches about English linger on.
Deborah Cameron’s The Myth of Mars and Venus is published by OUP.
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