it's all now here mostly this is what see the film a gyptian need to hosni mubarak had spots of course space challenges the corruption on the green the killing of protesters but activists say the military which are based in an oil prosecution dissidents in ways even more brutal than the previous regime. for all these israel's uptown saying a new assault to wipe out hezbollah in lebanon five years after the last deadly exchange some leads and we will help to shift attention at home from running social

unrest and civil war for the palestinian bid figment recognition. crane's football matches the common i'll give you neo nazi meeting crowd often times high that the country's all policies and actions that really things could ruin next year is the way for the state and i mean the previous leadership for encouraging naziism among. next to cross talk panel see if and nations might get along better if they get the same language. will. bring you the latest in something in some circles similar. to the future. ok.

welcome to crossfire thank you to all about the english language continues to flourish does it threaten other languages with one in three people speaking english does this promote western values and with the rise of asia english maintain its period position in the world. to discuss the language question i'm joined by robert philips and in copenhagen he is professor emeritus at the copenhagen business school in paris we go to jump on the idea he's the author of the book don't speak english parlayed globish and in hong kong we have david read all he is a distinguished visiting scholar at city university of hong kong and another member of our cross talk team yelena hunger all right gentlemen this is cross talk you can

jump in anytime you want and jump oh i'd like to go to you you have a new i suppose a language or quasi language that you're introducing to the world and it's called global bush and how is it different from english and if you could for partly could you answer in globish chorus oh there is english isn't even meant to be very correct english but it is the recording least like it is a simplified from obese we say this words you would see it's another fifteen thousand words and you know it's not easy surely that's way too much so we made good demonstration that was fifteen hundred words and then choose one of those words the david use of those words you could express all you need in the world for business purposes or as a tourist so it is english lite which still akari kingly all right well give us an example given is example what it sounds like and what words you like to use go ahead. i mean when you're in egypt or you're in english

this is this is if i don't need to be embarrassed in these are people who are worse is mostly comprised of me and my siblings you might understand that if you are in if there were meant to do or most people will not understand that so if you want to get on with your cause you can say we seize our company top management you know most going to have mostly me and your children are my parents and you get the same message across when the words are seen very to belong to my limited release and everybody will understand you better so your heat rate in terms of understanding we tend i was a bit earlier if you used these kind of observations ok robert if i go to you in copenhagen is this just jibberish bad english. i think it's very clear that. when you are in the real world you obviously have to communicate as best you can i am worried by the idea that a simplified form of english like that. is in it's a bit like madonna is asian it's a packaged version which apparently will give you the satisfaction that you need

whereas in the real world. people don't really function like that they negotiate meaning they try to get through and there's an educational goal i think they need to be exposed to relinquish as it is used in a whole range of contexts so i'm a bit worried that this is a quick fix in some way whereas learning english you have to be culturally sensitive depending on who you're speaking through which part of the world you are what your goals are it's a much more complex task then what globish claims to be capable of achieving ok david i mean it's a very good point you know the macdonnell ization of english but that's the trend in the world that everything's getting began allies i think john paul's point is that you know if you want to be able to communicate in communicate as best you can and i think if i'm i should we make it clear i should make it clear to my audience here. this is a this is a kind of climbs the language of non-native speakers speaking to each other like danes speaking to japanese japanese speaking to koreans and things like that it's

not really actually doesn't have anything to do with needed speakers of english i actually agree partly with both robert enjoin paul here and i think this is not really so much a question of mcdonald eyes asian as the struggle to communicate in the real world by people who go actually have a lot of english but i think it's quite right john paul is actually on to something here and saying that people need some guidance as to how to best ploy the limited resources of the language they have to communicate clearly and this is actually something which perhaps native speakers need to learn about as well so it's not entirely custom and so for non-native speakers ok i'll jump all in if then why not just learn english i think i'm going on line with robert was saying and if you want to use english want you to speak it properly. but we should make clear that there are auditions b.r.d. will be two kinds of english which gives you access to the culture of the anglo-saxon go here which is immense and very each outstanding green from

shakespeare conduct wayne and if you like bill gates so this is very good and if you want to enjoy it if you want to or he'd appreciate all the content you need to re an english which for a president me is a lifetime if not if you want to close a deal he. must call. to kill or in sci will if you speak laypeople speak in dallas texas nursed local people will not understand you and this is my observation when i went to japan in one thousand nine hundred ninety four just business decisions i observed some americans who are joining me from my team and i was a vice president with a b. in usa then and i observed that the japanese there and then the koreans and soon and the chinese in beijing i told the far east where much better ideas with me understood me. better than what i could observe between them and americans and that's why i said we saw us thinking we are not we are speaking

a different kind of language and there is something different so what is great and starts concerts from different business is concerned internationally he's not and we've given you had or the i did to meet wrote a report for the british council which i quote extensively in my book and in these people there are many scenes which are worse in forty year one of them is that in ninety six percent of the cases in international communications there is at least one no native english speaker who is involved and can step to you native english because to adjust to the regular of this person or not be as good as belief because next week would be ok example i mean i could agree with you maybe if you're talking about your childhood or buying a ticket to the train station or ordering in a restaurant or something like that. you bring a business i mean most businesses you have contracts and you have very specific laws and clauses and things like that this this language can't work for that if i

think i'm going to robert on that i mean it's for chit chat it's just to get you know get through something if that's something you wouldn't sign a contract with using this kind of language it's too imprecise i mean it has nothing to do with english as a school subject where you're trying to equip people to function you know in a range of ways and i at once one of things that worries me about the whole promotion of different types of english worldwide is that the assumption morris is that the only language you need worldwide these days is english you don't get far with english in latin america or even in southern europe or in most of asia so that when for instance danish companies are asked why they have failed to achieve a business deal in japan or in italy they tend to say always because they don't speak english well enough there whereas what companies ought to be doing in order to trade with japan and italy is to have enough people in the country who can actually function well and understand the culture as well as the language of japan

or korea or or italy so that so far as education is concerned it's a totally different ballgame and i agree really with the mystical bell here that the that the idea that you can do complex negotiations with a simplified register is misleading ok john paul you're shaking your head you disagree go ahead. and story or anything. illustration because i'm not a native english speaker as you might have released already and well so wonderful are different you for it is your own country. we go ahead. you know so i could there are many people who do that as far as contracts are concerned you have experience that can have a complex and constant then from american into english to begin with from into u.k. english so that you don't have to do when you're legally doing what you have to do is discuss what he got from and so your products or your services understand the needs of your customer and you don't need a full english for that you did you can do it with limited english providing you

forward to go rules you he formulates you use sentences and you check that your people are in front of you our understanding you which most native english speakers don't think they should do then and learning a foreign language to do business in these in a foreign land is valid in only one instance if you are living in destroying lands or used to be here you know you're full say stop was all who would have company so as soon as they assigned a frenchman two hundred company that is their lands he was expected to be able to run that and speed button for months so you had to pick a guy who's were going to german and english and in four months he was you know to discuss the scardino school's out in english not in his announcement in the country they don't know that that's true but when you are discussing international business you meet with people who are understood that war way language it was going to be some kind of india and there would be no step back because well for the first. part

i have my own intamin here take a jump here and go to david here why don't we put the shoe on the other foot i mean should native speakers of english maybe delve into this because it'll it'll make it easier for them to communicate with people and then i'm saying just for a limited purposes if you want to go travel around the world as we just it was pointed out in some places and in europe in asia and in south america there's very limited english wouldn't be a bad idea for native speakers they take a real short course in that and you can get by a lot easier. i'm not i'm all in favor of native speakers being talked how to use their language in a more effective ways when talking to non-native speakers i don't think it actually needs to sort of to learn a little light a special kind of english i think it's more about strategies and principles hold for using the language that you already know but i think that we are talking about different things here and i think that i agree a tyler with with robert on this that for ordinary service encounters to business so a low level then

a fine of some kind of english like will work but that's not how the global economy works i'm increasingly you have multinational companies for example working on a number of different countries you have research or technicians and so on who have to work as a global team and communicating with very high level their subject within that team across the world and that really does mean that everyone has to share a very high level of english i am going to jump in right here after a short break we'll continue our discussion on what some people call imperialism see with r.t. . if you start . to think of justice system. takes fifteen to twenty million years for the planet to recover from

a major extinction event but the planet has time we don't. it's been going on for months twenty twenty five years and search has been a good terrorist before there was even islamic fundamentalist terrorist in this country where nine eleven happened the bush administration could not find any terrorists because the feds couldn't find any real terrorists they decided to take these young people who are accused of property sabotage and label them as terrorists someone you destroy property. with absolutely zero intention of harming a single human being. in my mind is not a terrorist real people who are green in this country are the housewives who recycle. and the children who play trees on the weekend with their cub scout troops that's the. sound.

kind. of. stuff. more news today violence is once again flared up. and these are the images the world has been seeing from the streets of canada. trying to corporations rule today . we've got. the biggest issues get the invoice face to face with the news makers. and.

welcome them to. remind you we're talking about global language. but we thought let's see what foreign languages are most popular among russians global language over the years has been. global status being a language of business culture and diplomacy however english is not the only language used for international relations and. the united nations has six official languages arabic chinese english french russian and spanish. assist russians knowledge of foreign languages sixty seven percent said they speak english twenty percent german and another five percent can speak french though english today has a dominant position other languages are taking

a stand so what plank which will the world speak in future and will we all ever speak the same language. i example if i go back to you first one of the things i think is interesting is that you actually kind of. maybe correct me if i'm wrong kind of a linguistic nationalist yourself if you want to preserve good french ok how do you balance it with and someone that really is really a connoisseur of the french language. where people in france used to be very proud because to be direct ways of diplomacy. and if you have your say which was mostly discussed in english and then from there on french first you supremacy and people are very happy about that it was he praised by english for each and every purpose for us and these there would be no turning back because english is now our language which is going on the world not very well after very poorly even for researchers or people who seem to doubt highly very what it is

the language we use but when you see the vehicle for international communication and there would be no step back because for the first time in history the languages war widely and the communication is instantaneous these never happened in the roman times we let you know he'd wear a common vehicle our own to get around in but now this is the case that we don't back and when the french people are disparate about the situation they are wrong french we never get back where did he and as they used to say years ago in english you're listening we could do about it now he's beaten the actions this is finished and he would be there but it wouldn't be the english spoken like a david and peter if you being the spoken word like me and both of people like that and what asian you think it's a very interesting one if i go to robert on this one here i mean if we look at people at the impact of the internet on english and you know you can go to so many websites that purportedly are in english but they're in awful english there is

a grammar is awful the spelling is awful the word choices are all the syntax is awful but what is stopping this inane and really i do agree with you before before you know why don't you just learn proper english well the world is this way ahead of us here i mean they're going to use english anyway they want so i mean what direction are we going or can we just can we control it in any way probably not. the internet when it was launched meant that a lot of people felt that this would mean that english would expand at the expense of other languages in fact there are hundreds of languages used on the internet even very small ones demographically speaking and this means that obviously it makes a lot of sense in the modern world for anyone to want to have a very high level of proficiency in english the interesting thing for me at least when researching language policy is whether english is being added to people's repertoire which is great or else where the english is replacing other languages

and this is where you mention the word imperialism obviously under the soviet system the people of the three baltic states knew what linguistic imperialism was because bilingualism then was a dirty word for basically propping your own language and shifting into russian and that's exactly what happened in a lot of the colonial world where there was definitely a major focus on colonial languages like like french and english and english does open lots of doors world wide but one also needs to look at every particular context and see to what extent it actually closes doors for a large number of people well opening for the few david what do you think about that i mean the big recall the imperialism element that i mentioned at the end of the first part of the program i mean it for all of the learning of languages and english is the most predominant one now more talk about it later it's going to stay that way we have to think of a child of a chinese. is it is it just is this is there's a destroyer language is it replacing languages because in talking to some of my you

know people who work on cross talk you know even when they speak russian the russian english is invading their language and they're in russian you know in a working with me and it's all a mixture of speaking of variety of languages even when two of them are throwing in french at the same time i mean is this good or does it or does it matter. what you know i find it very difficult to get sort of terribly worked up about them but i would just look at how the english language came to being of the sort of mongrel language that we have anyway really sort of current preaching purity i think that it is true and i absolutely agree with robert but you have to look at particular situations this is a very dangerous area in which to generalize just because there appear to be these big global trends going on that doesn't mean that actually the situation and different countries is not very different particularly in terms of whether languages are actually being injured or perhaps i mean there's an argument to say here in hong kong that the role of english in hong kong is actually helping protect

cantonese as a sort of a past to root against the encroaching quote unquote mandarin ok john paul if i can go to you a lot of people in and i want to go into a big discussion here but it is easier is global value free does it have any values because it is a large a great argument in linguistics that you know it will take the english language for example it has a lot of built in values in the end and a world view and how to look at values in society it is global is globish like that or is it completely devoid of any kind of value in terms of having doubters. well the division being what i call english you know for interfering leash has the value of being in f. and with this and i didn't say you can say it was easy you want for reasons a to care president obama's inauguration speech because you can buy websites and put it in english and say exactly the same thing where you could wear her somewhere and

that he still ten times more people would understand it now you know gratian species for americans but nonetheless there are people outside who would like to listen to it and it doesn't what he says without any consideration which is always distorting the meaning so devalue is that it is efficient it is not a language at all saints and it is a tool to communicate and use a tool to make business and in that event it is enough but it doesn't go into values of the anglo-saxon culture it doesn't cater values of democracy doesn't care you know over there use this is not the goal the goal is a simple as we make it efficient and right away people who speak good enough english don't have he dition stupid people like you do and even if you don't deviate very seldom speak with people who don't speak with english because those who aren't who don't they dare not speak the native english speakers what do you think about that robert i mean is it isn't as i'm glad. i'm a bit puzzled by that because i think that immigrants like myself i live in denmark

although english is my mother tongue i mean i use four languages every week all the time and clearly once you have learned several languages there are vast advantages but to go back to your point about whether globish is intrinsically impregnated with the cultural values which english has evolved during its development over fifteen hundred years well i think i would say that very clearly english spread worldwide because of the british empire because of the colonization of america and australia and so on and this means that the idea that any language can be culturally neutral depends entirely on context any language can serve either good or evil purposes but a lot of the thrust behind global english at the moment is connected with globalisation with americanization and with consumerist values so in that sense very definitely just as john kerry has just said globish is connected with commerce and this commerce at the moment is dominated by american interests and other

european and japanese and other conglomerates where the chinese of bought into the same game and who knows where the chinese are taking us ok well i'm glad that's a good point here david what do you think i mean we were talking about being wish languages of all being and you mentioned how it is a barrier to or protecting cantonese there but i mean one hundred years from now we may be talking having the same program a different set of characters obviously but how are chinese mandarin chinese is invaded the world and how it so it's either you know promoted its language or polluted other language we could see people like ourselves you know speaking in a pigeon chinese. well i'm not too sure about that i mean i think there's no doubt that mandarin is increasing in importance in the world and more and more people across the world are getting interested in learning it as a foreign language but it's not going to displace english really i can't see that happening for at least another sort of hundred years or more and i doubt it is

going to happen i think that the world of languages is being rebalance to the moment that's for sure and i think but mind you see there are more important things actually going on in the world and english is implicated in them and for example in china and most primary school children are learning english now from really quite a young age in the big cities it's as soon as they go into primary school now right across the world this is happening this means that we have a younger generation going through schools just reaching secondary schools now in some countries like china who are going to be really fairly good english speakers and this the world has never seen this before these already these children these young adults are able to communicate directly to each other we were talking earlier about amish on the internet they can actually communicate directly to each other in a way that could never have been done before and i think that that is actually for

instance contributing to making the world slightly more unstable slightly more dangerous than before so this fred of english is a global language has many many dimensions more than just business now the interesting question for me is what if in fifty years time china decides to stop teaching english in schools would it have the clout then to start forcing countries around it to begin with to learn more mandarin start using more murder and i'm gradually turning to the end of time indeed we should do a program on the cultural and linguistic germany of mandarin chinese thanks my guest today in paris copenhagen and in height and thanks to our viewers for watching as you darkie see you next time. remember costs are. just so. slow.

in india all season one of the.