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From the Queen's English to the world's Globish … or not
By Geoff Strong
July 25, 2005
"du yu no vear dha laaybrari iz?"
"maay haart lips ap wen aay bihold e renbo in dha skaay …"
"sar, yuwar baegej did naut kam baay dhis flaait …" *
No, it's not gibberish - it's Globish. At least it's one form of Globish. In the search for a language that can be understood across the planet, there are two new English-based offerings that call themselves Globish, one out of France and the example above from India.
The quest for universal communication is nothing new. There was Latin across the Roman empire until it broke into the Romance languages; Arabic, widely used in Islamic countries; and Mandarin, an attempt to unite the Chinese dialects.
There have been artificial languages, such as Esperanto, Kosmos, Volapuk or Novial, which have mostly fizzled.
In the 20th century English spread across the globe, partly on the back of American films, songs and popular culture. This has prompted resentment among some, particularly the French.
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AdvertisementSo the publication about a year ago by a retired French computer engineer, Jean-Paul Nerrière, of a book called Don't Speak English - Parlez Globish was met with some dismay in his own country.
His Globish is essentially a stripped-down, simplified form of English with a vocabulary of just 1500 words.
A few years earlier, another engineer, Indian Madhukar Gogate, put forward his own proposal to iron out English spelling and pronunciation irregularities in a form that non-native speakers might more easily understand.
A Melbourne University linguistics professor, Michael Clyne, said such efforts were doomed, because English in various forms had already established itself as the international means of communication.
He said that although English was widely used, it often took a form that native speakers of English had difficulty understanding because they were usually monolingual and did not understand how another speaker might pronounce the language.
*Translations: "Do you know where the library is?" "My heart leaps up when I behold a rainbow in the sky." "Sir, your baggage did not come by this flight." |
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