Globishtrotters

One of the more surprising nominees for an Oscar this season is Mexican actress Adriana Barraza. In the movie "Babel," Barraza plays Amelia, a Mexican au pair charged with looking after two rich blond children in California. Amelia, who takes the children with her to her son's wedding on the other side of the border in Mexico, speaks Spanish with them. The boy and girl understand every word she says, even though their parents don't speak the language.

Barraza is just one of six Mexican Oscar nominees this year. One could attribute this to a golden age of Mexican cinema, and maybe to the fact that Latin American culture is now fashionable in the United States. But these, too, are just part of a larger phenomenon, yet another influence of globalization - the essentially economic process that has altered culture and language around the world beyond recognition. On the one hand, thanks to globalization, English has attained an unprecedented level of dominance; at the same time, the world is becoming more multicultural than ever before.

Jean Paul Nerriere, a Frenchman who worked for IBM for many years and served as the company's vice-president of marketing for a period of time, says that in the course of his business travels throughout the world, he has noticed something odd: "When I was in Japan I noticed that I could communicate with the Japanese much better than I could with my American colleagues. The Japanese and I both spoke broken English, but we understood each other without any problem."

Nerriere says that communication with the Japanese was freer than with colleagues for whom English was their mother tongue. "We spoke together without inhibition and without prejudices. I didn't judge them according to the level of their English, and they didn't judge me." In fact, Nerriere and his Japanese colleagues were not really speaking English to each other, but rather a limited and non-standard dialect of the language very far from the language of Shakespeare or Mark Twain.

Nerriere decided to devote himself to studying this new language, which he dubbed "Globish" - the language of the global village. It's a language that has spread all over and become a primary form of expression. Not only in IBM conference rooms, but also at demonstrations in Mumbai and Caracas, on blogs and chat rooms frequented by Chinese youths, in Israel and Iran. While officially, English is the second-most widely spoken language in the world (after Chinese) - more than a billion people speak it and this number is expected to triple within a decade - its linguistic dominance is not quite all it's cracked up to be.

For some time now, English has not been the same as it was when it left its countries of origin. As an international means of communication - it has become a truncated version of itself, and as a local means of communication - it's a "diluted" version that has absorbed other languages. So it is in the large Hispanic immigrant communities in the United States, and so it is among the hundreds of thousands of software programmers and customer service personnel in Southeast Asia.

English-lite

After retiring from IBM, Nerriere set out to document and decode the new international language - Globish. The Globish instruction guides that he wrote in French have already been translated into Spanish, Italian, Japanese and Korean. Now he's planning to have them translated into English, too, "so that Anglophones will finally be able to communicate with the rest of the world," he says.

Nerriere defines Globish as "English-lite," or "decaf English." Its lexicon comprises only 1,500 words (compared to the 600,000 entries in the Oxford English Dictionary, or Hebrew's approximately 80,000 words), and does not include complicated expressions or sophisticated adjectives. Sentences are kept brief (up to a maximum of 26 words). And, naturally, words that have already become international - like taxi, helicopter and sex - make up the heart of the language.

Despite the simplifications, Nerriere insists that Globish is still real English. "It's not a language on the level of 'Me Tarzan - you Jane,'" he says. "Using combinations of the 1,500 words that I've defined, you can create between 3,000 to 4,000 words, which is the average amount of words used by a person who speaks English as his mother tongue." To demonstrate the effectiveness of the definitions and the lexicon that he constructed, Nerriere translated into Globish several pieces of the Catholic liturgy, including "The Lord's Prayer."

Nerriere set himself a difficult challenge in choosing to begin teaching the language in France - a country whose inhabitants are renowned for their aversion to the English language. In the 1990s, the French government sought to halt the trend of the penetration of English words into its language, and called upon the Academie Francaise, the French Language Academy, to come up with French replacements for hundreds of English words that had filtered into the language.

Now, many in France are accusing Nerriere of damaging the purity of French and the dominance of French culture, but he maintains that he is doing just the opposite. "Globish is not a language," he says again and again. "Globish is a no more than a communication tool. A language is a device for transmitting culture and heritage. As in the way French and Hebrew represent the past and the culture of the nations that speak them. Globish does not represent anything. It merely facilitates easier communication among people who speak different languages."

In Nerriere's view, the study of Globish will actually have the effect of weakening the influence of American culture in other countries and enable local languages and identities to be strengthened. "The French needn't oppose me. I'm essentially stripping English of all its complexity and leaving a bare-bones version that is devoid of cultural baggage. Imagine if I were to come to the Academie Francaise and inform them that I was reducing their language to 1,500 words and permitting communication by means of brief sentences only, without adjectives or anything complicated. They'd go out of their minds."

Nerriere further contends that learning Globish can take much less time than learning other languages, and thus every child could be taught Globish while still retaining the option to learn another foreign language. "Ninety-three percent of children in France currently choose English as a foreign language, and miss out on the richness and beauty of languages like Spanish and Italian. If everyone learned Globish, they would acquire the ability to communicate in the world, and at the same time they could choose to learn another language."

Culture and subculture

Nerriere's Globish is not the first attempt to define an international language. In 1887, the Polish Jew Ludwig Zamenhof created Esperanto with the aim of facilitating communication among all the nations of the world. Efforts to disseminate the language and achieve Zamenhof's dream were unsuccessful. And although it is still spoken in some places and enjoys a lively existence on the Internet, Esperanto is perceived today as nothing more than a curiosity. Humanity would have to wait nearly another century to see something of Zamenhof's vision come true - for Globish is not really the creation of Nerriere, or anyone else. It is an outgrowth of the capitalist revolution and the transformation of the Western world into a global village.

Technical advances, particularly in the areas of transportation and communication, and with the peak, of course, being the development of the Internet as the most vital communication and work tool of our age - have brought the dream of eliminating the cacophony of the Tower of Babel closer than ever. In the past, certain languages predominated in specific fields: French was the language of diplomacy in the 19th century, and German held sway as the language of the humanities until the mid-20th century. But American domination of the world market and its political hegemony since the end of World War II, have made English the sole candidate for the language of worldwide communication.

But there is also another side to globalization: The same circumstances that gave rise to Globish and turned most of the world into a global village are also creating small pockets of resistance or insularism. These are blooming on the edges of the great industrial and business centers, where many immigrant neighborhoods have sprung up. Today's technology enables these immigrants to preserve the culture they knew back home. Internet communication, satellite television stations and common neighborhoods give rise to subcultures that exist in parallel to the wider culture.

The most prominent example, naturally, is to be found in the backyard of the instigator of the globalization revolution - the United States. There, in almost every southern state from Florida and Georgia in the east to Texas and California in the west, there are vast communities of Latin American immigrants, otherwise known as Hispanics or Latinos. There are approximately 45 million Hispanics living in the U.S. today, and they comprise the fastest-growing ethnic minority in the country. As a matter of fact, the U.S. has the world's fifth-largest Spanish-speaking population. Even though Hispanic immigrants come from a large number of countries and varied backgrounds, in America they are considered a single ethnic group.

Pour me some cola in the glasso

Ilan Stavans is a scholar of Spanish and Latin American literature at Amherst College in Massachusetts. He comes from an Ashkenazi Jewish family, was born in Mexico City, went to the U.S. to study and has remained there ever since. As a chronic outsider, he chose to study the culture and language of the Latino communities in the United States. His research focus has been the language that arose among these immigrants, a hybrid of Spanish and English known as Spanglish.

In the past, Spanglish was considered a language of the slums, but Stavans says that this has changed. "Nowadays it's cool to be a Latino in the United States," he says. "There's legitimacy to speaking Spanglish, and the language has moved from the margins to the mainstream." He cites a 2005 issue of TIME magazine that listed the "25 most influential Hispanics in the United States." The list included politicians, actors, artists, doctors, business people and social activists.

In addition to this testimony to the successful integration of certain individuals, the subculture of the Hispanic community has also become very popular in recent years. One example of this was the 2004 movie "Spanglish," starring Adam Sandler, Tea Leoni and Paz Vega. The highly popular singer Beyonce recently decided to record Spanglish versions of several hits from her last album, and also to put out a joint album in Spanish with the popular Columbian singer Shakira. Jennifer Lopez, whom some would call the "queen mother" of Spanglish culture, has announced that she will soon be releasing her first all-Spanish album.

When Stavans began researching Spanglish with academic methods, his colleagues argued that the language belonged not in academia but on the streets. But today, he says, many universities are studying the language, which has been called one of the most important linguistic developments in the United States in the 21st century. And a number of Spanglish variants have already been identified, with the difference deriving from the immigrants' countries of origin.

In his book "Spanglish - The Making of a New American Language," Stavans counts 6,000 different words and phrases in the language and, like Nerriere, he also translated excerpts of major works (such as "Don Quixote") into Spanglish in order to demonstrate its seriousness. However, this earned him the wrath of members of Spain's Royal Academy for the Spanish Language.

Spanglish is created in several ways: The first is the infiltration of words or whole sentences in English into the flow of speech in Spanish. The second, which is very common, is the use of words in English as a basis for the invention of new words that do not exist in Spanish. In such cases, the suffix of the word will be Spanish but the beginning will be English. A third way is a direct translation into Spanish of English sentence structure, or the pronunciation of a word in English with a Spanish inflection. Thus is created a language that both flits between the two languages and also creates new words that are linguistic hybrids. A few examples of Spanglish words: The English word "glass" becomes "glasso" and the English word "carpet" becomes "carpeta."

In the United States, the language has many opponents - some from within the Hispanic community itself, and some from the linguistic establishment. Stavans says that many people think that Spanglish creates ghettoes and keeps immigrants from getting ahead in society. Others believe the opposite is true, that Spanglish enables immigrants to learn English quickly and to integrate more easily into American society. Stavans: "It's true that the language is spoken primarily in neighborhoods with a very high percentage of Hispanic residents, but it broke through the class barrier long ago. The middle and upper classes also use it now. The best indication that it does not create a ghetto is that it's become attractive to Americans who are not Latinos."

Spanglish is gaining ground outside the U.S., too. Stavans says you can also hear it these days in Bolivia and Buenos Aires. "The Internet is a central factor in the spread of the language," he says. "Writers and poets are transferring it from a spoken language to a written language and this is a process that lends it a lot of weight. It used to take languages a long time to get established and develop. The Internet is shortening this process."

The future is here

Spanglish is just the most prominent example of a much broader phenomenon. Throughout the world, local languages are adopting English words while stripping them of their cultural baggage. Last November, a teacher from Derby, England published a dictionary of Hinglish. This is a combination of Hindi and English, which is spoken in India, but also very popular among the masses of Indian and Pakistani immigrants in England, some of whom are already third-generation Brits. The same linguistic dynamics that go into Spanglish are at work in Hinglish, and the same is also true of Singlish - the English spoken in Singapore, and Manglish, which comes from Malaysia.

"The waves of immigration throughout the world are affecting languages," says Stavans. "It's fascinating to see how Arabic is influencing French, and how Turkish is influencing German. Many countries have opened up to immigration and a lot of tension between languages has resulted."

Stavans thinks that the future of languages lies in multiculturalism and in the creation of hybrids spawned by the contact between cultures. English is spreading, but in the process it is losing its original meaning and accruing local influences from around the world. He says a scene from the 1982 science-fiction movie "Blade Runner" foresaw the future. In the movie, Rick Deckard (played by Harrison Ford) comes to Los Angeles in the year 2019. The city's residents speak a language that is a mixture of English, Spanish and Japanese.

"This future is starting to come near us," says Stavans. "The demographic process in the United States is turning Spanglish into the avant-garde of the new hybrid languages. It's an inevitable process."

English: I was chatting with my nephews in the salon when all of a sudden my mobile phone rang and scared the hell out of one of the toddlers.

Globish: Me and my brothers' children were talking in the living room when suddenly my cellular rang and scared the younger child very much.

English: I refrained from putting any undue burden on my siblings to transcribe any blurbs favoring my globish books.

Globish: I did not ask my brothers and sisters to write any good things about my books on globish. It would have been asking too much of them.

English: That erstwhile buddy of yours is a weird duck who will most probably put the kibosh on all our good deeds.

Globish: Your friend is too strange; he will probably ruin all our efforts.

	(Illustration by Itamar Dauva)