Customer Reviews

Globish: How English Became the World's Language

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I heard a glowing review of this book on NPR, and bought it for my Kindle within a few minutes. I have always had an intense interest both in the evolution of English and in its current spread into a global phenomenon, and so a book that looked at those two things seemed just about perfect. And what was better, the author was the guy who did that "A History of English" thing on the BBC. How could I go wrong?

Well, it wasn't a great book. It wasn't bad, but it had very little depth. A substantial portion of it was just a review of basic history, such as a description of Shakespeare's contributions or a restatement of one of Thomas Friedman's notions - and then with a tacked-on explanation of how it related to the development of Globish. The real mechanics of the process of English's evolution was seldom touched except in the most common way (i.e. a reminder that our most-used words all come from the Old). This was disappointing - I was hoping for something a little more scholarly and new. I was also disappointed in a similar way in the sections on the modern use of Globish - we are given only some light anecdotes reviewing the familiar trends of campus-educated Indians making the language their own and growing into a niche. It was about as innovative as last night's PB&J sandwich.

In short, this would probably be a great book for beginners and people unfamiliar with the things being discussed. If you weren't aware that Shakespeare coined a lot of words and that shucks we still use them today, then this is for you. But if you want something innovative and deeper, then save your money. Or I guess bring it to the beach.

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Reviewed by C J Singh

Historically, in 1600 A.D., at the time of the founding of the East India Company, in London, languages of the Indo-European family were already native to most of the lands extending from Ireland to the border of Burma six thousand miles east, and had been so for thousands of years. At present, the Indo-European language family has more than twice the number of native speakers (46 percent) than the next largest family, the Sino-Tibetan (21 percent), which has always been confined to East Asia. These numbers suggest that one of the Indo-European languages was likely to become the common language of the globe. English won. (Historical ifs: Spanish, if Philip's Armada had succeeded; French, if Napolean; German, if Hitler; Russian, if Stalin.)

So, what is this "Globish"? The term was initially coined by Madhukar Gogate, an Indian linguist, to describe an artificial dialect he created and presented to the Simplified Spelling Society of U.K. in 1998. (Example: "She is fine" in "Globish" becomes "She iz faain.") Like many earlier spelling-reform attempts, his " Globish" didn't take root. In 2004, Jean-Paul Nerriere, a retired French marketer, trademarked the term "Globish" and later published a book, provocatively titling it as "DON'T SPEAK ENGLISH!: PARLEZ GLOBISH." Nerriere's "Globish" is a subset of 1500 words and limited syntactical patterns derived from Standard English. "Globish" has precedents in "Basic English," a subset of 850 words proposed by linguist and philosopher Charles Ogden in his book, "Basic English: A General Introduction with Rules and Grammar" published in 1930. And, since 1959, "Special English," a subset of about 1500 words and simplified grammar, has been used in broadcasting "Voice of America" news to lands where English is a second language.

The projected marketing of Nerriere's "Globish" textbooks, which if adopted by instructors of English, will dumb down the teaching of English globally. Building on the initialism ESL for English as a Second Language, I propose the acronyms BESL for "Beginners' English as a Second Language" and SESL for "Standard English as a Second Language" instead of "Globish." The current Beginners' ESL books (levels one, two,...) get the learner started and present an incentive to upgrade from the beginners' levels to the Standard ESL books. Effective ESL books need to be specific to the learner 's first language as established by expert ESL scholars in books like Learner English: A Teacher's Guide to Interference and other Problems , edited by Michael Swan & Bernard Smith, and published by Cambridge University Press in 2001. This guide, a favorite of many ESL instructors, succinctly documents the interference patterns specific to twenty languages, ranging from Japanese to Spanish. (I routinely recommend the relevant chapter of this book to ESL authors for self-editing before I accept their manuscripts for editing.) Another excellent resource for ESL teachers is Understanding ESL Writers: A Guide for Teachers by Ilona Leki. When SESL writers start outnumbering native English writers, they will contribute more to the ever-evolving "Standard" English, making it the truly global language. No doubt, entrenched Anglophobes will resist the acronyms BESL and SESL because both include E for English. Quel dommage! Let them pretend that they have silenced the odious E simply by proclaiming the term "Globish."

Robert McCrum, in the prologue to his book, states his thesis: "Anglo-American culture and its language have become as much a part of global consciousness as MS-DOS or the combustion engine" (page 14). The book is aptly subtitled "How the English Language Became the World's Language."

"In 2006-7, about 80 percent of the world's home pages on World Wide Web were in some kind of English compared with German (4.5 percent) and Japanese (3.1 percent), while Microsoft publishes no fewer than eighteen versions of its `English language' spellcheckers.... A film such as Mira Nair's Monsoon Wedding is typical of the world's new English culture. The Indian bridegroom has a job in Houston. The wedding guests jet in from Melbourne and Dubai and speak in a mishmash of English and Hindi.... Take for instance, the 2006 Man Booker Prize. The winner was The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai, an Indian-born writer. ...The British critic John Sutherland was moved to describe Desai's work as `a globalized novel for a globalized world'" (pp 9-10).

McCrum's "Chapters 1 through 12, a biography of the English language, will sound very familiar to readers who've watched the popular documentary series on PBS, based on the book The Story of English , coauthored by McCrum. (Since its inception in 1986, the documentary has been shown many times on the San Francisco affiliate of PBS and many other affiliates.) "Globish" can be read as if it were the fourth edition of "The Story of English, third revised edition," published in 2002.

The twelve chapters are grouped under four parts: Founders; Pioneers; Populisers; and Modernisers. McCrum's retelling of the biography of English is engrossing. A few of his examples follow.

On Shakespeare: "Recent scholarship has shown that Shakespeare was actually an inveterate reviser," discrediting the assertion of the two actors who published the First Folio, "His mind and hand went together . . .Wee have scarse received from him a blot in his paper" (page 84). Shakespeare "to his bitterly envious contemporary Robert Greene, on his deathbed, was an `upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers . . . in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in the country'" (page 85). "It's nice to note that the motto of Shakespeare's theatre, the Globe, was `Totus mundus agit histrionem,' the whole world is a playhouse" (p 87).

On American-English: "From as early as 1735 there had been attacks on the `barbarous English' of the colonists and jokes about `Americanisms' such as antagonize, belittle, and placate. Dr Johnson had written trenchantly about `the American dialect, a tract of corruption to which every language, widely diffused, must always be exposed'" (p 112).

On American literature: "Hemingway put it succinctly. `All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called `Huckleberry Finn.'It's the best book we've had. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since'" (p 124). Good choice of quote; no English person could have written "Huckleberry Finn."

McCrum cites Oscar Wilde's comment on American English : "The Irishman drank the silver miners of Leadville under the table before formulating a Wildean paradox: `We really have everything in common with America nowadays,' he declared, `except, of course language' " (p 110).

[Yeah, right. Here's my fictive dialogue between two cousins, Stanford Singh visiting Oxford Singh:

Stanford Singh: Merriam-Webster says...

Oxford Singh: Nonsense. There's just one dictionary of the English language: `The Oxford English Dictionary.' Forget Mary-Ann Webster -- the American woman you keep quoting. Get over your infatuation with her!

Stanford Singh: Come on, Merriam-Webster Dictionary is used by many more people globally.

Oxford Singh: Don't think, we haven't noticed you Americans pinched our language. You owe us back royalties -- trillions and trillions of dollars!

Stanford Singh: The last British-English speaker on the planet will be an Oxford graduate from India.]

On World English: "How can one be original in a foreign tongue? As V.S. Naipaul puts it in his essay `Reading and Writing,' `I had begun to put together an English literary anthology of my own. . . . I wished to be a writer. But together with the wish had come the knowledge that the literature that had given me the wish came from another world, far away from our own.' Out of this limbo, the world's English begins to emerge" (p 209). Chapters 13 through 15 resume McCrum's argument stated in the prologue.

"In the twenty-first century the fusion of the English and the Hindi traditions...is creating a society uniquely equipped to contribute to, and benefit from, the development of English" (p 265). "The Times of India" has been certified as the world's largest selling English-language daily, and, according to ComScore, TOI online is the world's most visited newspaper website, ahead of "The New York Times," "The Sun," and "USA Today." Three of the examples McCrum cites are as follows.

A publishing firm in India, Pre-Media Global, founded by the brother-and-sister team of Kapil Viswanathan and Kami Narayan, both Indian graduates of the Harvard MBA program, offers outsource services for editing, designing, and producing for clients such as Wiley, Pearson, Houghton Mifflin, and McGraw-Hill. Second, the 2008 Man-Booker Prize was awarded in London's Guildhall to Aravind Adiga, for his novel The White Tiger , the fourth Indian novel to win. And third, the film Slumdog Millionaire , which won eight Oscars and four Golden Globes. Based on a debut novel, "Q & A," by an Indian diplomat, Vikas Swarup, its screenplay was successfully adapted by Simon Beaufoy, who simplified the dialogues, while maintaining the storyline.

I highly recommend McCrum's new book written for the general reader in excellent Standard English, not "Globish," despite his acquiescence -- temporary acquiescence, I hope -- for the latter term.

-- C.J. Singh

The reviews promise that the book goes over how English is *used* as the world's language - "observing Chinese English-language boot camps, Bangalore call centers..." - and I expected, from the reviews and the title of the book, that would be most of what the book is about: a discussion of how English has spread to other countries and continents, how it is taught there, what adaptations are made to English to make it "globish" with grammar and vocabulary more usable for speakers of, say, Mandarin, or Gujarati - perhaps some discussion with some of these users about how else they use English - does it take over their personal lives, once they start working strictly in English, for example. However, I got almost none of that. The use of English around the world as a, pardon the phrase, lingua franca, is only a very small part of the book.

The vast majority of the book is yet another history of the language - yeah, yeah, Celtic speakers, Anglo-Saxons, Norse, yeah, blah blah. There are LOTS of those histories out there already. This is no worse than any of them, but not particularly any better, either; there are no new insights into why Norman words were so much more readily accepted into Old English to turn it into Middle English than Norse words were, no fragments of Old English poetry or prose that we haven't seen in every other book about the history of English.

Let me also note that it's very British-centric, with very little mention of the original contributions to the language made by the world's *largest* English-speaking country, which seems a significant oversight to this native of said largest English-speaking country... yes, there is the occasional mention of the US, but you can tell that the author's attitude is that the US will always be inferior to the British.

In short, if you don't already have a book about the history of the English language, and you want one, then this is a readable one, but if you were really interested in the details of how English has become the second language of entire continents, you won't find any such details here.

Although to some extent the book did not fulfill my expectations of proving the case why English has become the global language, I think the author did a good job of weaving together historical facts to make a 'circumstantial' case. The latter part of the book also looks the issue from different angles (India and China) which add to the analysis.

The book does reflect the standard British air of superiority with some anti-Americanism (and the occassional dig at the French) and also shows a child-like infatuation for Barack Obama. However, these relatively minor errors do not overshadow the value of the book resulting from the broad approach taken by the writer.

The writing was good and the book fun to read.

There is nothing particularly wrong with Robert McCrum's new book, "Globish". In fact there are many good points he makes about the spread of English around the globe over the centuries. But I came away from the end wondering about what this book was intended to be. It certainly wasn't about the English language, as a language.

Anglophilia is big for McCrum (don't even bother to read "Globish" if you're French...you might want to start another revolution) but if this book is supposed to be one concerning English, the connections are rarely made. "Globish" is more about the socio-economic developments within the increasing English-speaking world and the narrative leaves you scratching your head. Why aren't there more examples of the English language? "Globish" gets off to a painfully slow start and never quite recovers. If you're not English, the long, drawn out early history of Britain is excruciating. I would have expected many more examples of the language itself, but history trumps words here and it's not very rewarding.

McCrum does occasionally have flashes of brilliance....his last pages are the best...contemporary usage of English in different countries...but by this time, one is glad simply to get to the end. For an historian, as McCrum is, I wonder where his proofreaders are....he gets the years of the battle of Gettysburg and FDR's inauguration wrong. As someone who collaborated on the terrific series, "The Story of English", I can't imagine that this book has as much disconnect as it does with the language, itself.

A number of reviewers of this book on 'Amazon' point out that it is not really what it purports to be, an examination of the way English has been modified in various parts of the world. Rather it is for its first chapters a very readable re- accounting of the story of the development of English from Roman times. It's basic premise is that a there is a new diluted form of English, 'Globish' which has become the lingua franca of English as second- language people. They speak to each other in this fifteen - hundred word vocabulary language primarily on economic and business subjects.'Globish' is the communication tool which is more understandable to its speakers than is the far more rich and culturally deep English itself. The thesis that Globish is the wave and way of the future is however questioned by some who point out that actually only twenty- five percent of the world's speakers speak Globish. Seventy- percent do not know English at all. Others question the notion that most English- language - speakers content themselves with 'Globish'. They point out to ways in which these speakers aim to enrich their vocabulary, and knowledge of the language and in so doing enhance their own cultural depth. As a native English speaker who lives in a country where many people know and use English as a second - language I can attest to the fact that many English- as - second- language speakers attain a level of English far beyond 'globish' In fact they are so exposed to English language media and culture that their speech is pervaded by usage and often misusage of complex English expressions and vocabulary.

Terrible book, I can't believe I plowed all the way through it. It perpetrates a fraud on the reader, claiming to have something to do with the spread of English as an international language, while it's really a rambling, disjointed, incoherent jumble of passages loosely related to the development and spread of Anglo-American culture. It reads like a first draft, or perhaps a mind dump to which some editor added a title instead of forcing the author to rewrite the text around some kind of unifying theme.

If you're really interested in the story of English, I heartily recommend the aptly titled "The Story of English" -- which, oddly enough, is partly written by the same author.

Globish is about the English language,its history and its quick spread throughout the world.The first 200 pages of this interesting and fascinating book are devoted to the history of English.A small island in the North Atlantic which was colonized by Rome,pillaged by other neighbours,becomes finally a huge empire with its zenith in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,bringing along a fantastic gift to humanity- that of the English language.Then another empire across the Atlantic,the United States,continued this mission especially after WW2 and the world has been revolutionized by

English.This language has at this point become the lingua franca of our planet.As the author puts it, "English is like a virus that has spread round the world,carrying with it a way of looking at,and expressing,new experiences".Some 80 per cent of today's Internet pages(circa 40 billion pages)are written in English,and the dictionaries of English become obsolete immediately after being published because it is almost impossible to update them.Almost each transaction is affected by English everywhere and even the Moon had the honour of having English as the first language spoken on it.With the aid of the PC and the Internet, we are witnessing daily a cultural phenomenon where English is everywhere:in politics, sports, the industrial world,the movies and the computer games-all being helped by the multi-rapid technological innovations and advances.

Among those responsible for the evolution of the language was William Caxton,described as "an engaging hustler".He became the first editor-publisher and printed the works of Chaucer and Thomas Malory's 'Morte D'Arthur'.This happened in the late fifteenth century.English was the language of the settlers who came to America.Thomas Paine was one of the "founding fathers of of the world's English",while Mark Twain spoke and wrote in a language that was distinctly American.

The turning point and the beginning of the global culture was in 1989 and the fall of the Berlian Wall,after which emerged "the worldwide cultural revolution that would become Globish".

More than 350 million Chinese are learning the language today,and the same goes for India and other parts of the world.English has become a global means of communication that is irrepressively contagious,adaptable,populist and subversive.What will the future of English be like? No one really knows,but one thing is certaing: this book is here to stay with us for a very long time,because it is simple,yet intriguing and intelligent,with a lot of information and original insights.Add the fact that is is also highly entertaining!

Non-fiction can be entertaining as well as informative. McCrum has proven this in Globish. Illustrating how English wears the uniforms of many cultures and peoples, McCrum gives the reader vivid examples of the richness of this global language. From the image of a committee writing the King James Version of the Bible to the Globish phenomenon of a 'Free Culture Movement' with roots of a belief system in the rights of the public domain, this volume is a not-to-be-missed journey through the ages of the development of all things English and, thus, Globish.

Like so many bestselling books Globish has a clever title and an intriguing theme. But the story could be told in an essay without a laborious academic description of English world history and culture. Globish is a chronological account of the English language, beginning with the Viking invasion, Alfred the Great, the Norman Conquest, Shakespeare, the American Revolution, the American Civil War, the British Empire and finally the modern digital world. The authors argue that English is uniquely suited to be a world language because it has always been non-elitist accommodating to influences of other languages. Furthermore, English has word length averaging 5 letters as compared to Inuit's average word length of 14 letters. Also English lacks subscript and superscript notation, making it easier to enter into a keyboard.

But the book confuses the assets and liabilities of English as a spoken language and English as a written language. The missing chapter in the book is one describing the evolution of printed English, through Gutenberg movable type, the typewriter, the QWERTY keyboard, the 8-bit personal computer, the dot matrix printer, and cellphones with keyboards. The rapid adoption of English as the language of the Internet and the wireless phone is in part due to the evolution of the simple and useful 26 letter English keyboard found on our computer keyboards and hand held phones.

So buy the book and read it. Speed read through the first half to get to the best parts about new world pidgin languages of Hindish, Urdish, Japish, Spanglish, etc.