What Are You Saying?

Appropriately perhaps,since this is a book on the English language,the reviewer faces a tricky language issue. Books apart from those few great ones can be called good,bad or okay. Globish presents a problem because while you will hesitate to call it a good book,and while calling it a bad book will be plain wrong,calling it an okay book seems insufficient. Given the scope of McCrums study,he seems to deserve an adjective less prosaic than okay. So,lets expand the reviewers vocabulary. Globish is a goodish-baddish book.

Goodish because McCrums efforts to provide a short history of English may be valuable to those who are very unfamiliar with the subject. Baddish because would those very unfamiliar with the subject read this book? If it is fair to assume that most of McCrums readers will be the other kind,then it would also be fair to assume that those readers will be somewhat underwhelmed by the re-rendering of a well-known history: how the people who subsequently became English resisted the French,how the language developed from Caxton to Shakespeare to America,what Macaulay did for the language in India,etc. This reviewer,utterly no expert but a fairly energetic reader on the subject of English language,found the going hard. The chapter on India is not baddish. Its plain bad theres a cut and paste,very hurriedly written feel to it. If you have read Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World by Nicholas Ostler,you may want to escape from McCrums history tour,which shows nothing new. To be fair,McCrum has another book,The Story of English,that was written a while back. I havent read the book. It may well have been a better history tour. Maybe,McCrums problem this time is the same faced by those most powerful peddlers of the English language,Hollywood studios the problem of the sequel,which is never as good as the first effort.However,Globish is principally not about what happened with English,its about whats happening and whats going to happen. Whats happening,McCrum says,is that English plus Microsoft equals a new cultural revolution8230;. There are many sophisticated ways to quibble with this statement there are many sophisticated ways to quibble with any statement,in any language but basically,McCrum is right. Spot on,to use an expression that may not find favour with the users of Globish,which,as McCrum explains,is a global users manual for those who dont know English but want to talk write email in it. Globish has just around 1,500 words and none of those quirks that are the real charm of the English language. Its very brutally user-friendly,the user being,say,someone who speaks Serbo-Croatian trying to talk to someone who speaks Tagalog. They wont use,they cant use,English. But they can and,as McCrum points out rightly,should use Globish. And there would have been no Globish without the internet. Heres a delicious counter factual thought: what if,instead of the Americans,the French developed the internet? Would we have all been learning French,or rather Globench?

When McCrum explains Globish,the book is goodish,sometimes quite good. But when he does reportage on Globish,the book tends towards baddish. His reportage on Chinas efforts to master the English language is no better than most long newspaper features on the subject. A book should deliver more,much more.

The other baddish thing is McCrum does not seem to consider in any detail how the relationship between English and Globish might develop there may be complications. Right now,Globish speakers recognise English as a higher form. They dont necessarily want to learn it,but they acknowledge its the mother language. Might Globish one day become so useful as the global language that English would lose the parental status? Another question,can you write something worthwhile in Globish?

India gets a fairly cursory treatment in McCrums book,surprising,since outside UK/ US/ the Anglophone part of Canada/ Australia/ New Zealand,India has the largest concentration of English speakers.

But that may be good because it should provoke a smart publisher to commission a book on how the English language will develop in India. I will even propose a title. Inglish: Macaulay Who?