The Rise of Global English

As a novelist, I know that you show the truth about your characters by putting them under stress that threatens their identity. As a writer and editor, I know that nothing stresses writers and editors more than confronting issues around "bad English," "improper usage," and sloppy punctuation.

Such confrontations usually happen in private when the editor and writer lock in deadly embrace over a stray semicolon or whether it's all right to write "alright." But the Internet has brought these quarrels out into public scrutiny.

America and Britain, Oscar Wilde once observed, are two great nations divided by the same language. Now the division affects the whole English world, and countless foreign countries as well.

According to Global Reach, a website that monitors Internet use around the world, some 801 million people are currently online. Just 35 percent of them— 295 million—are English speakers. Many of the remaining 544.5 million, however, are people for whom English is an additional language. English is the de facto language of the Internet, but just whose English? And for how long?

Watch an editors' or content developers' mail list light up about "ize" versus "ise," "color" versus "colour," and you see that people in different countries feel their identities are somehow at stake. And so they are, but not perhaps as we might fear.

Our dialect is our cultural DNA. Whatever we may choose to say in it, we have a subtext: This is who I am. If your dialect is different, you are different and maybe we don't even have anything to say to one another. As Professor Higgins observed long ago in My Fair Lady, "An Englishman has only to open his mouth to make some other Englishman despise him."

The Language of Power
Hatred or respect may spring from the dialect of the aristocratic or the plebeian, from the urbane or the rustic. Usually it is those on the economic or geographic margin whose language is most despised—not because it lacks eloquence, but because it does not speak in the accents of power.

Chaucer's English, 600 years ago, became the ancestor of our English only because London was the political and economic hub of medieval England. Vigorous literatures in regional dialects are now lost to all but scholars, because they left no descendants. Those who might have become Northumbrian Shakespeares moved to London and adopted the dialect of the rich and powerful.

The British Diaspora sent Chaucer's descendants all over the planet, in colonies that preserved or mutated the home dialects. The Appalachians are home to expressions long forgotten at home—and most Americans still use "gotten," which Brits find as quaintly archaic as "God wot." But London itself is marginal now, and power speaks English with an Appalachian-descended Texas twang.

Or so it seems. But the metaphor of the margin—the silence, the blankness that gives context to the central words—is fading. In a medium without a margin, the marginal are not only finding a voice, they are renewing the language itself.

The Diaspora is reconverging through the Web, like an enormous family reunion. Distant cousins are taking a fancy to one another and slipping outside together for a breath of air. Who cares who speaks "superior" or "standard" or "proper" English? One sexy idiom, and all our defenses (defences?) collapse in surrender.

Falling in Love with New Dialects
Some of the relatives at this reunion are in-laws, people from Scandinavia or India or Spain who've married into the language. They're pretty cute too. (Who cares if "cute" to Chaucer was short for "acute," meaning "as pointed as a needle"?) Let's have lunch after the reunion and really get to know one another. We seem to have a lot in common, and we can gossip about everyone else.

A whole new dialect—maybe a new language—is emerging from Web English. Its subtext is still "This is who I am," but it's an identity far less parochial than the language has ever expressed before. Several factors are at work in the creation of this new Global English.

One factor is what I call "crystallization." Someone comes up with a standard operating system, and everyone else adopts and adapts to it. The same thing happened a century ago with the QWERTY keyboard. Good or bad, such crystallizations are unstoppable.

Web jargon itself has crystallized not only English but numerous other languages. Visit a Website in Spain; even its Spanish-language pages use terms like "web," "content benchmarking and audit," "fulfillment," and "site." A Brazilian site offers "setup" and "hosting" for local "websites," as well as "e-mail"—and you can put your purchases in a "shopping cart."

Do Spaniards or Brazilians, confronting these exotic anglicisms, feel threatened? Or do they feel that these words make them members of an important new community?

Probably both, just as native English speakers may wince or grin at a new slang term that welcomes some while excluding others. If you're a Brazilian who doesn't understand "setup" and "shopping cart," you feel excluded—and in your own country, on a site ostensibly in your own language. At best, you associate them with modernity and glamour, though they're otherwise meaningless. But if you do know these terms, you feel like part of the in crowd.

Reasserting Identity
What's true of non-English speakers is still more true of those of us in the Diaspora. Canadian newspapers a few years ago reverted to "colour" and "labour" because their readers preferred the British usage to the American. American magazines and the New York Times are available almost anywhere. The sheer weight of the American presence forces many Canadians to resist; in a case like this, adopting the neighbo(u)r's usage gains you nothing. The Americans don't even notice. Sticking to your own usage lets you hang on to a scrap of your identity.

Global English therefore seems to be evolving in step with self-consciously regional dialects. Most of us, if we write and edit for the Web, will become polyglots in a single language: writing Global for formal occasions, writing local for friends and family, writing in others' dialects when we want to get along with (or sell to) some of our cousins and in-laws.

Within each dialect, of course we have questions of register: choosing the words that convey the right social relationship with our readers and listeners. I may impress my Latin American students with my 1950s-vintage Mexico City Spanish, but should I address a young female student intimately as "tu" or more distantly as "usted"? In the new dialects of Global English, is "ma'am" a courtesy or an insult? If I use American Plain Language, will an Australian lawyer find me pleasantly clear or babbling baby talk?

These are questions of exformation, of grasping background and context that our readers take for granted. We can learn that background only by trial and error, and even our readers might find it hard to explain it to us. Nor would they all agree on, for example, when to use "tu" with an unrelated young woman, or the value of Plain Language in Australian legal writing.

If Chaucer's dialect became Standard English thanks to power, then standardization is also a way of preserving that power, keeping it in the family of those who master its rituals. Many English teachers still regard their job as preparing students for a rite of passage into the ranks of power. Like Professor Higgins, we want the power elite to take our mudlarks for princesses.

Yet the Web and the Net disperse power, enabling the once-silent to speak in any voice they choose, to scribble in the margins and between the lines of the central text. We may sneer at their spelling and punctuation, but what can we do about it? Send them grumpy email, and hope we haven't made any typos or accidental errors in grammar?

As writers and editors, we will have to accept that our dialect, for all its virtues, is just another dialect. Others' dialects may be less eloquent or flexible, but they deserve just as much respect. And, as we are learning in the ongoing family reunion, exchanging cultural DNA will give both Global English and its dialects a welcome new strength and reach. Imperial English took words from every language it encountered; Global English should welcome words from its own dialects. If it's going to be the world's speech, it might as well be worthy of the hono(u)r.

Comments

[Derek]

If you haven't read it, I highly recommend a book that's now almost 20 years old, The Story of English:

http://www.amazon.ca/exec/obidos/ASIN/0142002313/penmachine-20/

It was a companion to the U.S. PBS series of the same name, and provides a wonderful, thorough, and easy-to-read overview of the evolution and spread of English around the world. The references to technical English and some of the regional dialects (particularly of South Africa and, sadly, Sierra Leone) seem a bit dated, but overall it has aged well, and discusses many of these same issues in some detail.

[Maurice Sujet]

The statistics given about the number of English speaking people in many countries of the planet are based on inquiries resulting of self-evaluation and the given proportions of persons very proficient in English are quite exagerated. All people traveling a lot in the world can make this objective observation.
Many of us should like to know the numbers of european deputies who can debate in Brussels in full equality with their English colleagues having English as their mothertongue. They are not so many because even in the north countries having a germanic language you can read
for instance in AFTONBLADET (Sweden) "when it's a nuanced reasoning we risk to say what we can and not what we would" or "it's easier to mend a beer in a pub than to discuss around the table of a board of directors". We may add in international meetings where English is the only language allowed and where all documents must be in English. Is it fair to all members who don't speak excellent English and is it democratic when the statutes proclaims the equality of languages in Europe and the right for everybody to use his or her native language?
Is it possible to get real numbers of persons in every part of the world having really an excellent knowledge of English, not only passive but also active, in order to be able to fully participate actively , on equality level, in debates or discussions?
Thank you for your attention and please pardon my flawly English . Usually with my English or US friends, and with my many friends from all continents, I'm using Esperanto and I can use my brain for finding ideas instead of thinking of all the traps of national languages as English or French. I'm enjoying this privilege now from fifty-five years , and this privilege, which I got in only four months by myself teaching, is growing every day with the use of " Internet which seems created for Esperanto" as once wrote to me a German friend. If you want to hear this pleasant language from Poland, China or Vatican regulary broadcasting from many years you may
go to http://radioarkivo.org
or type www.esperanto.net or type only the word esperanto on Google server and you'll receive many pages (more than one million) in the international language or about it.
The knowledge of Esperanto is also very useful to give interest in other cultures and instigate to learn other languages , like English, more rapidly and with more success. It occured to me as to many of my friends: for us Esperanto was a real stepping stone ( or a spring-board ) to learn English and to improve our national language.After objective inquiries the NITOBE Commission recommended its teaching in the states of the League of Nations after the WW1 and UNESCO did the same in 1954 and 1982 because the Esperanto speaking organisations are aiming at the same goals of peace and culture with respect to the diversity of all languages and cultures. Every knows that many languages are in peril, and linguists are aware that their destruction would be an intellectual catastrophe." The greatest intellectual disaster that the planet has ever known" , wrote David Crystal , the eminent author of the Cambridge Encyclopaedia of English Language (1995) in article to GUARDIAN and p.viii in his work "DEATH OF LANGUAGE" (Cambridge University Press). For as wrote the Linguistic Society of America in a policy statement in 1994
"The loss to humankind of genetic diversity in the linguistic world is (...) arguably greater than even the loss of genetic diversity in the biological world" ( p.34).
It's urgent for the leaders of the world to think of these wise positions of intellectuals who know what they are speaking of.

[Eliot (Amy)]

Great article. How do you feel about US-based websites with global events and members being written in American English? We're having that struggle in our organization right now. My British husband thinks we should write in British English anytime referring to our UK conferences, but I think the site should have a standard usage...