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Globish: How the English Language Became the World's Language |  | Author: Robert McCrum
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Category: Book
List Price: $26.95
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Rating:  10 reviews
Sales Rank: 24104
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Pages: 331
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.6
Dimensions (in): 9.5 x 6.6 x 1.3
ISBN: 0393062554
Dewey Decimal Number: 420.9
EAN: 9780393062557
ASIN: 0393062554
Publication Date: May 24, 2010
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
How English conquered the world: a Guns, Germs, and Steel argument based on the power of the word. It seems impossible: a small island in the North Atlantic, colonized by Rome, then pillaged for hundreds of years by marauding neighbors, becomes the dominant world power in the nineteenth century. Equally unlikely, a colony of that island nation, across the Atlantic, grows into the military and cultural colossus of the twentieth century. How? By the sword, of course; by trade and industrial ingenuity; but principally, and most surprisingly, by the power of their common language.
In this provocative and compelling new look at the course of empire, Robert McCrum, coauthor of the best-selling book and television series The Story of English, shows how the language of the Anglo-American imperium has become the world’s lingua franca. In fascinating detail he describes the ever-accelerating changes wrought on the language by the far-flung cultures claiming citizenship in the new hegemony. In the twenty-first century, writes the author, English + Microsoft = Globish.
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 10
 The "Globish" menace to Standard ESL Teaching May 20, 2010
C. J. Singh (Berkeley, California, USA)
35 out of 49 found this review helpful
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 several times on the San Francisco affiliate of PBS and many other affiliates.) "Globish" can be read as if 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
Any literary collection from general libraries to college-level holdings will find this a fine coverage! August 14, 2010
Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA)
Globish: How the English Language Became the World's Language shows how and why English grew from the language of an isolated island nation to become the world's main tongue. It considers not just how English evolved in the past, but how it's still evolving today to become 'Globish', incorporating many world changes. Any literary collection from general libraries to college-level holdings will find this a fine coverage!
Fascinating book August 29, 2010
P. M. Spiegel
This book reviews the history of the English language, and shows how English has become the new lingua franca of the world. It is fast paced and relatively short for this topic, more like a short story than a history. It's fun, and great if you're already familiar with English literature. Told from a British rather than American perspective - I had to look up a number of references. An enjoyable experience.
The Empire of the English Language June 9, 2010
Paul Gelman (HAIFA , ISRAEL)
6 out of 10 found this review helpful
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!
Globish July 6, 2010
Chantico
2 out of 5 found this review helpful
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.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 10
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