Global Business English: Get Ready for Globish

When native speakers work internationally, their language often changes. David Crystal, the author of English as a Global Language, writes: "On several occasions, I have encountered English-as-a-first-language politicians, diplomats, and civil servants working in Brussels commenting on how they have felt their own English being pulled in the direction of these foreign-language patterns . . . These people are not 'talking down' to their colleagues or consciously adopting simpler expressions, for the English of their interlocutors may be as fluent as their own. It is a natural process of accommodation, which in due course could lead to new standardised forms."

“You are bound to have more variations when you have more people writing and speaking a language,” says Steven Moore, Co-Founder and Dean of Global Business English, a web-based company that offers instructional modules, written coaching, and verbal coaching. “We might even see something like Nadsat, the verbal language Anthony Burgess created in A Clockwork Orange.”

“Nadsat is mostly English with some Cockney rhyming slang, phrases from the King James Bible, some Russian words, and words that Burgess invented.”

“Nadsat is really a vocabulary of extra words used for semi-private communication or to describe the world as they see it,” says Moore, “That makes it not so much a language as an argot. The words are inflected in English patterns regardless of their language of origin. Alex and his droogs are capable of speaking standard English when they want to.”

For more, go to Get Ready for Globish on the Writing Tips page of Moore Partners