What are globes, and why do you possibly speak it without suspecting it

What is globish, how did it come about and can it completely replace English in the whole world? Martha Gosovskaya told about this and many other things in her blog for with the BBC.

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Next - from the first person.

Have you ever found yourself thinking that in English it is much easier to communicate not with native speakers? What is easier to explain to Yoko from Tokyo than to Richard from London? What does Uwe from Sweden say more clearly and more readily than Emma from the United States?

Why is that? Why do we, those who are not native to the language, not understand native speakers as well as those who are at the same level with us?

Actually, the answer lies in the question itself: we studied the language from more or less identical sources - textbooks, podcasts, audio books and programs, we were more or less taught to distinguish between simple and perfect tenses, even the first hundred words studied were approximately the same. And to put it very briefly, we rather speak Globish rather than English.

What is globish? Globish is a simplified version of English, the so-called lingua franca of the modern world.

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The term “globish” itself appeared in the early 1990s. It was proposed by Jean-Paul Nerrier - oddly enough, not a linguist, but a businessman who noticed that business communication in English comes down to manipulating a maximum of three thousand words and four hours.

In fact, the history of globes can begin even from the lightning-fast Englishification of India by Thomas Macaulay. The British historian, who arrived in Calcutta (India) on government affairs, immediately realized that the traditional study of English would not work when a very large number of people needed to learn the language in a very short time.

He developed an educational program of “minimal English” that could be learned in record time - courses that issued the corresponding certification lasted three, six and nine months - initial, satisfactory and intermediate levels of language proficiency. Within six years, English became the dominant language of communication in Calcutta.

Globish is not pidgin or slang, not Esperanto or Volapuk. It is, rather, an emasculated version of the language, an organic patois (local dialect), a tool for understanding, rather than creating new images or cultural layers.

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Its purpose is purely utilitarian. As Forbes editor Frederic Alan noted, “globish is the body’s response to the blurring of boundaries in the modern world. Language responds to people’s basic need to explain themselves.”

If you draw a parallel from the abstract to the material, it is like bread and water, which satisfy hunger and thirst, but do not satisfy the gourmet who would like to enjoy a meal of delicious dishes.

To study the basics of globes, according to Jean-Paul Nerye, you need a maximum of a week time. Here, everyone who tried to master a foreign language can round their eyes in surprise: we all know perfectly well that in a week you can somehow learn ten verbs and a couple of nouns that will not be very skillfully combined into sentences that are not amenable to any tenses and ways .

Actually, this is enough to start: field studies prove that it will be possible to buy and sell food or essential goods and services, and what cannot be verbally explained can always be expressed with gestures and facial expressions.

The strategies of broadcasters that use globes are finally applied by those who have functional English with a vocabulary of more than three thousand words.

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Have you ever forgotten the right word in the middle of a conversation? Or don’t know what you need at all? I have had to do this more than once. I had my first such experience when I was eight years old, and I remember it as I do today: I didn’t have enough of the word siblings (brothers or sisters) and without hesitation, I applied the descriptive method, replacing it with simpler ones that are well known to me - brothers and sisters. sisters (brothers and sisters). This is just a vivid example of how the globish principle works: everything that can be simplified, simplify it.

Of course, it will not be possible to read and recite the poetry of Robert Burns with a minimal globish vocabulary, but that is not its purpose. Robert McCray, author of the world bestseller “Globish: How English Became the Language of the World,” notes that Globish is an economic phenomenon, it is the language of slogans and advertising, and not the poetry of Kipling and Orwell’s novels.

And here a natural question arises: is globes able to supplant English? It is unlikely, because there are always those who want to read Orwell’s novels and recite Kipling’s poetry in the original.

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