Thursday, June 03, 2010

Globish; How the English Language Became the World’s Language,
by Robert McCrum (Viking; $40.00).
by guest reviewer Gordon McLauchlan

The case has been made that the Renaissance, which heralded the rise of the West as the pre-eminent force in the world, was driven by the spread of Latin as the common intellectual language of Christian Europe.
Even after it had broken down into national vernacular dialects, Latin remained the common language of scholars until the 18th century, the glue that gave multi-national cohesion to scientific, political, theological and philosophical thinking throughout the Continent and Britain.
Latin is now dead beyond revival, so perhaps we should say, Long Live Globish!, in the hope it will become a unifying force in the world.

English writer Robert McCrum, (pic right, Paul Hamlyn for The New Yorker), in his new book, makes a cautious case for the continued expansion of this new internationalised English, defined as “the worldwide dialect of the third millennium”.
If there is a problem, it may be that Globish, via billions of Chinese, Koreans and Japanese, could become a dialect that English first-language speakers have trouble deciphering. Anyone with a name like McLauchlan knows that “l”s are almost unmanageable for most Asian speakers.  I had a son who worked in Singapore for a few years and decided it was prudent to change his surname, for the time being, to “Mak”.
But one certainty is that with the internet and the increasing prevalence and pace of international trade and travel, something linguistically has to give, some common currency of language will arise. 

Will it be Globish? India -- which is predicted to displace China as the most populous nation in the world over the next few decades -- is already won over. So it may well depend on China, which threatens to regain the position it had  in the first millennium of the most advanced nation in the world. As McCrum points out twice as many people speak Mandarin as English.

But the smart money would suggest that around the planet English is at present the unifying language and America’s the most common popular culture, among young people at least. So Globish has a head start. What is most interesting is how it will develop a d change over the coming decades.

Most of McCrum’s book digs deep into the history of English, explaining where it came from and how it spread to become the most widely spoken international language. He has been over this ground before in The Story of English which he co-wrote and which accompanied a widely-watched television series of the same name launched simultaneously in Britain and the United States in 1986.


What I like about Globish is not only its thorough look at the origins and development of English but that McCrum approaches his task with a balanced sense of history, without any of the simplistic nationalism that may have come from a less mature writer.

Gordon McLauchlan is an Auckland-based writer and commentator.

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