discussion next to knotty. world. view the latest in science and technology from around the world. we've got the future covered. and you can. follow and welcome to cross talk it 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 will english maintain its period position in the world. and you can.

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 john paul nidia he's 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 yell on the hunger all right gentlemen this is cross talk we can jump in anytime you want john paul 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 globish and how is it different from english and if you could for partly could you answer in globish forests. oh there globish is english isn't even meant to be very correct english but it is where we go english like it is a simplified form of english with less words you would six hundred fifteen thousand

words in the oxford english dictionary that's way too much so i make the demonstration that was fifteen hundred words and the children of those words to david lives of those words you can express all you need in the world for business purposes or as a tourist so it is in english light but still a correct english all right will give us an example given is example what it sounds like and what words you like to use go ahead. or. i mean when if it or you in english this is this is if i go you need to being brass in this argued over worse is mostly comprised of me and my siblings you might understand that if you are in is there were meant to be the or most people will not understand that so if you want to get the message or cause you can say this is our company the top management you know most going to have mostly me and the other two hundred my parents and you get the same message across when doors are seen very belong to my limited release and if it were not on you better so your heat trait in terms of

understanding would be ten dollars better if you used nice garden or formulation 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. isn't it's a bit like mcdonald is asian it's a packaged version which apparently will give you the satisfaction that you need whereas in the in the real world. people don't really function like that they negotiate meaning they try to get through and as 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 to which part of the world you are what your goals are it's

a much more complex task than what globish claims to be capable of achieving ok david i mean it's a very good point to you know the mcdonnell ization of english but that's the trend in the world that everything's getting mcdonnell lies i think john paul's point is that you know if you want to be able to communicate and communicate as best you can and i think if i'm we make it clear i should make it clear to my audience here. this is a this is a kind of quasi 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 native speakers of english i actually agree partly with both robert and john paul here and i think this is not really so much a question of mcdonald ais ation as the struggle to communicate in the real world by people who don't actually have a lot of english but i think it's quite right john paul is utterly on to something here and saying that people need some guidance as to how to best deploy 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 just a matter for non-native speakers ok i'll jump all in if then why not just learn english i think i'm going online what robert was saying and if you want to use english when you do speak it properly. well we should make clear that there are additional b.r.d. would be two kinds of very english which gives you access to the culture of the anglo-saxon girls share which is immense very rich outstanding going from shakespeare to mark twain and if you like bill gates so this is very true and if you want to enjoy it if you want to read appreciate or use content you need to re an english which four percent of me is a lifetime if not if you want to close a deal in must call or in tokyo or in c. or. if you speak like people speak in dallas texas must look at the people who will not understand you and this is my observation when i went to japan in one thousand

nine hundred ninety four does business decisions you observe some americans who are joining me from my team i was a vice president with i.b.m. usa then and i observed that the japanese there and then the koreans and soon and the chinese in beijing are two of the far east where much better and he's always me and understood me better understand them better than what i could observe between them and americans and that's why i said we thought we were speaking english we are not we are speaking a different kind of language dazed i'm seeing different so what is great as fast culture its function is this is a concern internationally he's not and dave you had or who have been good to meet wrote the book for the british council which i quote extensively in my book and indeed people there are many things which are worse if you want to hear one of them is that in ninety six percent of the cases in international communication there is at least one known native english speaker who is involved and it's up to you native

english speakers to adjust to the river of this person or not be as good in worshipping as girlish because they could be ok example i mean i could agree with you maybe if you're talking about your childhood or buying a ticket at a 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 go to robert on that i mean it's for chit chat it's just to get you know get through something is this 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 or you're trying to equip people to function in a range of ways and i want one of things that worries me about the whole promotion of different types of english worldwide is that the assumption more or less 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 their 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 the the idea that you can do complex negotiations with a simplified register is misleading you jump all you're shaking your head you disagree go ahead. i'm sorry or think. illustration because i'm not a native english speaker as you might have released already but i reckon it's a wonderful arbitrator in the british foreign countries. to me go ahead. you know

so i could there are many people who do that as far as contacts are concerned you have experience that can have the contracts and concentrate them from american into english to begin with from into it u.k. english so that you don't have to do when you're negotiating what you have to do is discuss going to be the performance of your products or your services understand the needs of your customer and you don't need a full english for that you need you can do it with a limited english providing you for a new governor almost you he formulated you use sentences and you check that your people in front of you are understanding you which most native english speakers don't think they should do then learning a foreign language to do business in d.c. in a foreign land is valid in only one instance if you are living in this foreign land so used to be you know manage your forces focus or do we have got any so as soon as i signed frenchman two hundred companies that is their lands he was expected to be

able to learn dutch and speak dutch in four months so you had to take a guy who spoke with the german and english and in four months he was enough to discuss with god who's. in english not in his announcement in a country they don't so that's true but when you are discussing international business you need people who are understood that the war where the language was going to be some kind of english and there would be no step back because well for the first. part i have mine and then here they can 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 say take a real short course in that and you could get by a lot easier. i'm not i'm all in favor of native speakers being taught 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 it's an english light a special kind of english i think it's more about strategies and principles of using the language that you already know but i think that we are talking about different things here i think that i agree a tyler with with robert on this that for ordinary service encounters just doing business at a lower level then find some kind of english like work but that's not how the global economy works increasingly you have multinational companies for example working in a number of different countries you have researches technicians and so on who have to work as a global team and communicating at very high level about 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

stay with r.t. . if you. still . want to. the east. room is the some guests. slug.

see. the so. sick sick sick. sick the eco system just skimming the surface of the so. welcome back to cross talk i'm beautiful about the tree mind you were talking about global languages same if you see. but before it let's see what foreign languages are most popular among russians.

global language over the years english has. global status being a language of business culture and diplomacy however english is not the only language used for international relations and communications the united nations for example has six official languages arabic chinese english french russian and spanish the public opinion foundation assessed russians knowledge of foreign languages six to seven percent said they speak english twenty eight percent german and another five percent can speak french though english today has a dominant position other languages are taking a stand so what language will the world speak in future and will we all ever speak the same language peter. paul 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 you you want to preserve good french ok how do you balance it with globalization and being someone that really is a a connoisseur of the french language where be very france used to be very proud because it used to be the language of diplomacy to nineteen eighteen and it if you have your say which was mostly discussed in english and then from there on in french last you supremacy and people are very happy about that it was he praised by english for each and every proposed morris and these there would be no turn back because of english is now a language which is built around the world not very well done very poorly even for researchers of people who seem to are highly variable but it is their language which is we're going to see the government be calling for international communication and there will be a new step back because for the first time in history. the language is war wide and the communication is instantaneous these never have been in the roman times we are

letting their geek wear our community our own to get there on the end but now this is the case so that we don't back and do it when the french people are desperate about the situation they are wrong french would never get back where did he and as i used to say many years ago if you're listening we could do about it now is the actions this is to be there but if we are going to be the english spoken like by david then peter if we're being the spoken like me and by us or people like that and you're saying it here it's a very interesting point if i go to robert on this one here i mean if we look at what 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 are the grammar is awful the spelling is awful the word choice is awful the syntax is awful but what is stopping this inane and really i had agreed with you before before you know why don't you just learn proper english while 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 we go in 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 of 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 dropping their 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 on colonial languages like like french in 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 while opening it 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 learning of languages in english is the predominant one now we'll talk about it later if it's going to stay that way we have to think of the child the chinese but i mean is it is it just is is is there's a destroyer language is it replacing languages because in talking to some of my young 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 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. well it's you know i find it very difficult to get sort of terribly worked up about them and 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 go around preaching purity i think that it is true and i absolutely agree with robert that 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 in 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 bias to root against encroaching put on by mandarin ok john paul if i can go to you a lot of people in and i want to go into a big chomsky discussion here but it is easier is global value free does it have

any values because we there's 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 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 values. where it has. being what i call english you know far enough in leash as if you're being enough and we used this and i didn't say you can say it was easy you want for reasons i do care president obama as you know gratian speech you consider my websites and put it in english saying exactly the same thing but if it were her somewhere in tajikistan ten times more people would understand it now do you know gratian speech is for americans but nonetheless there are people outside who would like to use and do it and it has done 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 sense and it is a tool it's a tool to communicate and use a tool to make business and inventive it is enough but it doesn't carry devalues of the anglo-saxon culture doesn't qaeda values of democracy doesn't go you know the rules are used this is not the goal the goal is a simple tool that we make it efficient and by the way people who speak good enough english don't have to talk to people like get their own name in that video and even very seldom speak with people who don't speak good english because those who aren't who don't they dare not speak to me to 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 that 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 family is so in that sense very definitely just as john kerry has just said global issues connected with commerce and this commerce at the moment is dominated by big 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 evolving 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 chinese mandarin chinese is invaded the world and how it's either promoted its language or polluted other language we could see people like ourselves you know speaking 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 rebalanced at the moment that's for sure and i think you see there are more important things actually going on in the world and english is implicated in them 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 now 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 english 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 mandarin and gradually turn running out of time and maybe we should do a program on the cultural and linguistic germany of mandarin chinese thanks to my guest today in paris copenhagen and in hong kong and thanks to our viewers for watching us here r.t. see you next time right. member prost are. just some up. and. say.

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