The fact is that English no longer depends on the U.S. or U.K. It’s now being shaped by a world whose second language is English, and whose cultural reference points are expressed in English but without reference to its British or American origins. Films like the 2009 Oscar-winning Slumdog Millionairehasten the spread of Globish—a multilingual, multicultural cast and production team creating a film about the collision of languages and cultures, launched with an eye toward Hollywood. The dialogue may mix English, Hindi, and Arabic, but it always falls back on Globish. When the inspector confronts Amir on suspicion of cheating, he asks in succinct Globish: “So. Were you wired up? A mobile or a pager, correct? Some little hidden gadget? No? A coughing accomplice in the audience? Microchip under the skin, huh?”
Globish is already shaping world events on many fronts. During last year’s Iranian elections, the opposition used Globish to transmit its grievances to a worldwide audience. Cell-phone images of crude slogans like GET AWAY ENGLAND and FREE, FAIR VOTING NOW, and innumerable tweets from Westernized Iranians communicated the strength of the emergency to the West.
In the short term, Globish is set to only grow. Some 70 to 80 percent of the world’s Internet home pages are in English, compared with 4.5 percent in German and 3.1 percent in Japanese. According to the British Council, by 2030 “nearly one third of the world’s population will be trying to learn English at the same time.” That means ever more voices adapting the English language to suit their needs, finding in Globish a common linguistic denominator.
The distinguished British educator Sir Eric Anderson tells a story that illustrates the growing life-and-death importance of Globish. On the morning of the 7/7 bombings in London, an Arab exchange student tried to take the Underground from southwest London to his daily class in the City. When he found his station inexplicably closed, he boarded a bus. During his journey his mobile phone rang. It was a Greek friend in Athens who was watching the news of the bombings on CNN. Communicating urgently in the Globish jargon of international TV, he described the “breaking news” and warned that London’s buses had become terror targets. As a result of this conversation, the student disembarked from the bus. A minute later it was destroyed by a suicide bomber, with the loss of many lives.
This is not the end of Babel. The world, “flatter” and smaller than ever before, is still a patchwork of some 5,000 languages. Native speakers still cling fiercely to their mother tongues, as they should. But when an Indian and a Cuban want to commission medical research from a lab in Uruguay, with additional input from Israeli technicians—as the Midwestern U.S. startup EndoStim recently did—the language they will turn to will be Globish.