I wasn’t alone in noticing this change. In 2007 I came across an article in theInternational Herald Tribune about a French-speaking retired IBM executive, Jean-Paul Nerrière, who described English and its international deployment as “the worldwide dialect of the third millennium.” Nerrière, posted to Japan with IBM in the 1990s, had noticed that non-native English speakers in the Far East communicated in English far more successfully with their Korean and Japanese clients than British or American executives. Standard English was all very well for Anglophones, but in the developing world, this non-native “decaffeinated English”—full of simplifications like “the son of my brother” for “nephew,” or “words of honor” for “oath”—was becoming the new global phenomenon. In a moment of inspiration, Nerrière christened it “Globish.”
The term quickly caught on within the international community. The (London)Times journalist Ben Macintyre described a conversation he had overheard while waiting for a flight from Delhi between a Spanish U.N. peacekeeper and an Indian soldier. “The Indian spoke no Spanish; the Spaniard spoke no Punjabi,” he says. “Yet they understood one another easily. The language they spoke was a highly simplified form of English, without grammar or structure, but perfectly comprehensible, to them and to me. Only now do I realize that they were speaking ‘Globish,’ the newest and most widely spoken language in the world.”