Globish, Glanglish and Google Translate

There's a new book out about the rise and use of a globalised English, dubbed "Globish":

Globish is a privatised lingua franca, a commercially driven “world language” unencumbered by the utopian programme of Esperanto. As taught by Nerrière’s enterprise, it combines the coarseness of a distended phrase book and the formulaic optimism of self-help texts – themselves a genre characterised by linguistic paucity, catchphrases and religiose simplicity.

I won't be buying it, mostly because I wrote about the rise and use of a globalised English, dubbed "Glanglish", over 20 years ago. It formed the title essay of a book called, with stunning originality, "Glanglish." This is what I wrote:

English has never existed as a unitary language. For the Angles and the Saxons it was a family of siblings; today it is a vast clan in diaspora. At the head of that clan is the grand old matriarch, British English. Rather quaint now, like all aristocrats left behind by a confusing modern world, she nonetheless has many points of historical interest. Indeed, thousands come to Britain to admire her venerable and famous monuments, preserved in the verbal museums of language schools. Unlike other parts of our national heritage, British English is a treasure we may sell again and again; already the invisible earnings from this industry are substantial, and they are likely to grow as more and more foreigners wish at least to brush their lips across the Grande Dame's ring.

One group unlikely to do so are the natural speakers of the tongue from other continents. Led by the Americans, and followed by the Australians, the New Zealanders and the rest, these republicans are quite content to speak English - provided it is their English. In fact it is likely to be the American's English, since this particular branch of the family tree is proving to be the most feisty in its extension and transformation of the language. Even British English is falling in behind - belatedly, and with a rueful air; but compared to its own slim list of neologisms - mostly upper-class twittish words like 'yomping' - Americanese has proved so fecund in devising new concepts, that its sway over English-thinking minds is assured.

An interesting sub-species of non-English English is provided by one of the dialects of modern India. Indian English is not a truly native tongue, if only for historical reasons; and yet it is no makeshift second language. Reading the 'Hindu Times', it is hard to pin down the provenance of the style: with its orotundities and its 'chaps' it is part London 'Times' circa 1930; with its 'lakhs' it is part pure India.

Whatever it is, it is not to be compared with the halting attempts at English made by millions - perhaps billions soon - whose main interest is communication. Although a disheartening experience to hear for the true-blue Britisher, this mangled, garbled and bungled English is perhaps the most exciting. For from its bleeding hunks and quivering gobbets will be constructed the first and probably last world language. Chinese may have more natural speakers, and Spanish may be gaining both stature and influence, but neither will supersede this mighty mongrel in the making.

English is so universally used as the medium of international linguistic exchange, so embedded in supranational activities like travel - all pilots use English - and, even more crucially, so integral to the world of business, science and technology - money may talk, but it does so in English, and all computer programs are written in that language - that no amount of political or economic change or pressure will prise it loose. Perhaps not even nuclear Armageddon: Latin survived the barbarians. So important is this latest scion of the English stock, that it deserves its own name; and if the bastard brew of Anglicised French is Franglais, what better word to celebrate the marriage of all humanity and English to produce tomorrow's global language than the rich mouthful of 'Glanglish'?

Twenty years on, I now think that the reign of Glanglish/Globish will soon draw to a close, but not because something else will take its place.

The obvious candidate, Chinese, suffers from a huge problem: linguistic degeneracy. By which I mean that a single word - "shi", say - corresponds to over 70 different concepts if you ignore the tones. Even if you can distinguish clearly between the four tones - which few beginners can manage with much consistency - saying the word "shi" will still be much harder to interpret than a similarly-mangled English word, especially for non-native speakers. This makes it pretty useless as a lingua franca, which needs to be both easy to acquire, and easy to understand even by novices.

But something is happening that I hadn't allowed for two decades ago: machine translation. Just look at Google Translate, which I use quite a lot to provide rough translations of interesting stuff that I find on non-English language sites. It's pretty good, getting better - and free. I'm sure that Google is working on producing something similar for spoken language: imagine what a winner Google Voice Translate for Android would be.

So instead of Globish or Glanglish, I think that increasingly people will simply speak their own language, and let Google et al. handle the rest. In a way, that's great, because it will allow people to communicate directly with more or less anyone anywhere. But paradoxically it will probably also lead to people becoming more parochial and less aware of cultural differences around the globe, since few will feel the need to undergo that mind-expanding yet humbling experience of trying to learn a foreign language - not even Glanglish.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.

Chinesepod's Milestone

Today marks a milestone for the innovative language-learning site Chinesepod: it has published its 1000th Mandarin lesson. Those not familiar with the Chinesepod phenomenon will be surprised to learn that the lesson, like the other 999, is freely available: for Mr. Chinesepod, the Shanghai-based Dubliner Ken Carroll, is a connoisseur of the Web 2.0 world. He understands that in the digital age, the secret to making money is to give away the entry-level stuff to attract interest and build a vibrant community, and then to make money by offering premium content to people who are already know the value of your free resources.

Chinesepod's methods have been widely copied, something that Carroll, to his credit, is remarkably relaxed about. In any case, the Chinesepod family has already grown to include a Frenchpod, Spanishpod and Italianpod, with Russian, Arabic and German versions in the works.

Carroll obviously understands that its not the basic idea - of using downloadable lessons, interactive resources and message boards - that counts, but the execution. Speaking as one of the many tens of thousands of poddies who eagerly await their daily ration of digital Chinese, French, Spanish and Italian, I can attest to the fact that Carroll and his superb team certainly deliver.

Indeed, looking back over the last 1000 lessons, I'd go so far as to say that it's not so much that Chinesepod has *passed* a milestone, but that it *is* a milestone in language learning. Here's to the next 1000, Ken.

Well, Well, WALS

Now that's what I call open content:

WALS is a large database of structural (phonological, grammatical, lexical) properties of languages gathered from descriptive materials (such as reference grammars) by a team of more than 40 authors (many of them the leading authorities on the subject).

WALS consists of 141 maps with accompanying texts on diverse features (such as vowel inventory size, noun-genitive order, passive constructions, and "hand"/"arm" polysemy), each of which is the responsibility of a single author (or team of authors). Each map shows between 120 and 1110 languages, each language being represented by a symbol, and different symbols showing different values of the feature. Altogether 2,650 languages are shown on the maps, and more than 58,000 datapoints give information on features in particular languages.

WALS thus makes information on the structural diversity of the world's languages available to a large audience, including interested nonlinguists as well as linguists who would not normally read grammars of exotic languages or specialized works by comparative linguists. Although endangered languages are not particularly emphasized, they are automatically foregrounded because of the large sample of languages represented on each map, where each language (independently of its number of speakers) is shown by a single symbol.

(Via Languagehat.)

Lost for Words

The world is poorer today:

Marie Smith Jones, who worked to preserve her heritage as the last full-blooded member of Alaska's Eyak Indians and the last fluent speaker of their native language, has died. She was 89.

(Via Language Log.)

Crowdsourcing the Language Ark

Samuel Johnson famously wrote an early English dictionary entirely on his own. But a far better approach today would be to write one collaboratively across the Internet, with people offering and refining definitions. And given the global nature of the Net, better make that a multilingual dictionary, too.

That's what LingoZ is trying to do. At the moment, the number of languages covered is relatively small; what I'd like to see is this widened to hundreds and then thousands of languages. As well as a useful resource in terms of translation, it could also play another important role: preserving the hundreds of languages faced with extinction as a kind of virtual ark. I'm not sure that LingoZ has the vision to do that, but somebody should. (Via eHub.)

Zlango! - Mind Your Language

I have mixed feelings about constructed languages. On the one hand, efforts like Esperanto seem utterly pointless to me: given that there several thousand real languages out there, some of which are quite widely spoken, why bother learning one that is made-up? On the other hand, efforts like Lojban are certainly interesting from an intellectual point of view.

My initial reaction to Zlango veered between these two extremes.

Zlango has created a new, inspiring icon based language which transforms web and mobile messaging into an expressive, juicy, colorful icon-based experience.

Zlango is a revolutionary, simple and practical language. It’s made up of over 200 icons divided into intuitive and memorable categories. Words, concepts or feelings can be expressed by the different icons.

Users love Zlango. They find Zlango easy to learn and master, and find that learning the language is unbelievably fast and amusing. They also say that using Zlango always generates a good and playful mood.

At first sight, this sounds pretty trivial. But the results are interesting. They show how very simple means can be adopted to communicate, albeit with an Indo-European bias, both in terms of structure and as far as the signs are concerned.

Of course, many will see this as further evidence of a "dumbing down" of language, brought about technology. But potentially Zlango could evolve in all sorts of interesting ways, particularly if its users are allowed to innovate and determine how new symbols should be added. In other words, Zlango needs to embrace standard Web 2.0 practices if it is to move beyond its relatively lowly beginnings. (Via TechCrunch.)