• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

In addition, there are various engineered languages, including Esperanto, Basic English, Globish, Simplified English, Plain English, and General Service List (GSL). Esperanto was invented by L. L. Zamenhof in 1887 and was officially recognized by UNESCO in 1954 as a mixture of several European languages. Basic English was created and trademarked by Charles Kay Ogden and gained some popularity after World War II. It is based on 850 key words.

Globish was created and trademarked in 1998 by Jean-Paul Nerriere, a French former IBM executive, who selected 1,500 words as a basic vocabulary. He sells books, including his own 2009 book entitled Globish the World Over, containing rules and lessons. In 2010, Robert McCrum, an editor at the London Observer, chose the proprietary word Globish as the title of his book describing the intermingling of English with other languages. His book praises Nerriere without specifically endorsing the learning materials he sells.

A Simplified English was developed for the aerospace industry with rules restricting sentences to no more than twenty words, and “noun clusters” to no more than three words. Plain English is attributed to Sir Ernest Arthur Gowers, a British civil servant and author of The Complete Plain Words. GSL is a list of some 2,000 words selected by Michael West in 1953 as enough to understand about 90 percent of colloquial speech.

Happily for humanity, none of these artificial lingos have caught on widely, though many an English teacher has probably exhorted her pupils with lowercase pleas to write in simple, plain, basic English.

THE CASE FOR AMGLISH

As for a nonproprietary name for the new lingo, there have been many suggestions, but all—including Global English, Panglish, and Worldlish—originate in Britain, the country most worried about the future of its mother tongue.

But not one reflects the dominance of informal American English in the evolving international lingo. Yet in his book McCrum admits that the evolving language “is heavily influenced by linguistic and cultural developments in the United States.29

Googling the word Amglish in February 2011 brought nothing relevant except a single entry in the online Unword Dictionary, which said Amglish is “spoken by the majority of people in the United States, and indeed some young people in the United Kingdom.” Some individual Brits have acknowledged online that the word Amglish better reflects the facts on the ground in their own country than other names.

The word Amglish even has an ancestral quality to it. It is only a tiny blip away from Anglish, the first spelling of English when it separated itself from Germanic and Nordic tribal mutterings in the fifth century.

Perhaps it’s time for professional linguists and the international community to finally recognize the leading role of informal American English in creating the first genuine, easily usable lingua franca.

Whatever name eventually sticks to the verbal mélange, citizens of the world have been ready for years to lap up any language that works for them in their efforts to communicate with other people in the world.

This chapter has described how communications technology, globalization, and other factors have made the world so receptive to an informal international language. The next chapter describes more than two dozen international “lishes,” the combinations of national languages with English.

The Lishes of Amglish

FEEL YOURSELF AT HOME.

—A welcome sign in Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport

The sign quoted above is typical of the Amglish found all over the world. It shows the humorous result when a nonnative speaker of English tries to use the language in a public way without making sure that the meaning is what the writer intended. The Dutch are particularly adept at this type of composition.

The sign is just one of many language mixtures seen or heard in today’s global cacophony. Words and syllables from one or more languages are imported into another language, often resulting in a mixture that