gene change in cuba it's very hard to get away from a policy like that as we see with afghanistan i mean the reason the united states going into afghanistan supposedly was to get blunt we're going one is going god but the united states is not out of afghanistan it's very difficult to get the us foreign policy machinery to move and that that that's all we have time for around the stories we covered at r.t. dot com slash usa so how are you paid youtube dot com slash r t america and follow me on twitter how to connect.

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feeds now in the palm of your. question on the. morning news today violence is once again fled up the phone these are the images. from the streets of canada the for corporations or. alone and welcome to cross talk back you will 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 phillips and in copenhagen he's professor emeritus at the copenhagen business school in paris we go to john paul nidia 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 yell on the hunger all right gentlemen this is cross talk we 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 posse language that you're introducing to the world and it's called globalists and how is it different from english and if you could for partly could you answer in globish for us oh yeah. english isn't

even meant to be very correct english but it is what we call english lite it is a simplified form of a nice words you would see some of the fifteen is now worth in the it's not easy three that's way too much so you may get the most efficient it with fifteen hundred words and to choose one of those words if they made use of those words you could express all you need in the world for business purposes or as a tourist so it is in english light but still a great thing to write well give us an example given his example what it sounds like and what words you like to use go ahead. well. i made one very easy to tell you in english this is this is going to lead to being brothers in these argue the worst is mostly comprised of me and my siblings you might understand that if you are in the war almost a video most people will not understand that so if you want to get to mr cause you to say this is our company. management little moment we have mostly me and the

children of my parents and you get the same message across when the words are seem very long to my limited release and it will send you better so your heat rate in terms of understanding will be penned i was better if you used nice caring 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. is in it's a bit like mcdonald is asian it's a package 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 through which part of the world you are what your goals are it's a much more complex task than what so globish claims to be a capable of achieving ok david i mean well 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 mcdonnell wise 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 where my audience here. this is a this is a kind of kweisi language of non-native speakers speaking to each other like again speaking to japanese japanese between the koreans and that means there is not really actually doesn't have anything to do with needed speakers of english i actually agree partly with both robert enjoin and i think this is not really so much a question of mcdonald eyes ocean 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 on line with 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 the only the english which gives you access to the culture of the anglo-saxon girls here which is immense very each outstanding going from shakespeare to mark wayne and if you like bill gates so this is very true and if you want to enjoy it if you want to he that we should all use content you need to run in english which focus on late me is a lifetime if not if you want to close

a deal in must call or talk you'll 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 i observe some americans going to need from a team i was a vice president with a.b.n. usa then and now observe that the japanese there and then are growing and soon and the chinese in beijing i talk to the far east where much better ideas with me and just couldn't even 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 there is something different on the road that is correct as fast i'm sure it'll turn business is concerned he's going to relate he's not and we believe in god or on the i could to meet wrote the book for the british

council which i could extensively in my book and in these people there are many scenes which are worse he brought me here 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 can step to you needing usually goes to adjust to the river of despair certain or not be as good in worshipping as good because like me 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 without 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 where 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 oh it's 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 milk

a jumbo you were shaking your head you disagree go ahead. well i'm sorry and i think. illustration because i'm not a native english speaker as you might have released already but adequate so wonderful i understand you're going to spread this around companies. go 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 contacts and constant them from american into english to begin with from into u.k. english so that you don't have to do when you're negotiating what you have to do is discuss what he from and so your products or your services understanding needs are your customer and you don't need a full english for that you did you can do it with a limited english providing you four or new girl rules you he formulate you use sentences and you check that you're in front of you our understanding which most native english speakers don't think they should do then and 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 these foreign lands or are used to be here you know many of our ses thought it was all good it would have been any so as soon as they are saying frenchman two hundred company that is an answer he was expected to be able to get and speak dutch and for months so you had to take a guy who's will go into german and english and informants he was you know to discuss with god who's our link in english we're not in his announcement in many countries they don't so that's true but when you are discussing international business you need who understood that the waterway language was going to be some kind of english and there would be no step back because on the first. part i had my countrymen here to get jumpy 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 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 it wouldn't be a bad idea for native speakers say 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 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 what's up in english light a special kind of english i think it's more about strategies and principles old fellow using the language that you already know but i think that we are talking about different things here i think that i agree a tiley with with robert on this that a fraud or a service and characters just doing business had a lower level then find some kind of english like will work but that's not how the global economy works now i'm increasingly you have multinational companies for example working in a number of different countries you have research ers technicians and so on who have to work as a global team and communicating at 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 and what some people call imperialism stay with turkey. to. take you to. the future you can just see. the. dreams you believe the sensation since it was something else. the future.

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welcome back across time peter tree mind you we're talking about global languages. which. started. before 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 poorly cations the united nations program has six official languages arabic chaney's english french russian and spanish the public opinion foundation assessed russians knowledge of foreign languages six to seven percent said they speak english twenty percent german and another quite percent can speak french though english to be has a dominant position other languages i taking

a stand so what playing which will the world's future and will we all ever speak the same language peter i example if i go back to you first one of the things i think is interesting is that you actually kind of a little baby 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 globish and being someone that really is a a connoisseur of the french language. very france used to be very proud because it has to be the language of diplomacy but can i. say which was mostly just personal and then from there on. you supremacy and people are very happy about that because we've raised by english for each and every group was more or less and these we've been working on back because english is now our language which is spoken around the world not very well after and very poorly even for researchers of people who have seen the out high

level but it is the language we use we're going to see the common behavior for international communication and there will be no stared back because for the first moment he story. the languages were wide and the communication is instantaneous these have been in the roman times where letting the heat wear a common vehicle around to get there on the end but now this is the case that we've been looking back and when the french people are just about the situation yeah wrong french would never get back where did he and as they used to say many years ago this you're listening we could go i didn't know you and your actions this is finished and easily be there but if we're going to be the english spoken by david then peter if you're being poor like me and i was a people like that and you think 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 there really awful english there is

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 we 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 thought 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's 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 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 colonial languages like like french and english and english does open lots of tools worldwide 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 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 in english is the most 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 this 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 their working with me and it's all a mixture of us speaking overriding 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 when i would just look at how the english language came to being of the sort of mongrel language that we have any way to really sort of 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 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 but the role of english in hong kong is actually helping protect cantonese as a sort of a plastic group ok. mandarin ok john paul if i can go to you a lot of people and i want to go into a big discussion here but it is easier in 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. well. being what i call english you know for you know if english as devalue or being in f. and with d.s. and i could they will say you can say it was easy you want for reasons i took president obama's inauguration speech because he did my website and put it in english saying exactly the same thing but we think we're her somewhere into g.q.

still ten times more people would understand it without the 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 the value is that it is if the show and it is not a language i don't see it and with it is a tool it's a tool to communicate and use a tool to make business and in that example it is enough but it doesn't carry the values of the anglo-saxon pressure exam qaeda values of democracy doesn't go erode over the years this is not the goal google is a simple tool as we make it efficient and by the way people who speak good enough english don't have to go to people like they do and they need to be here and if you very seldom speak with people who don't speak good english because those words we don't they dare not speak english speakers what do you think about that robert i mean is that this isn't going to go ahead. 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 colonize ational america and australia and so on and so 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 how the english language is 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 by different set of characters obviously but how chinese mandarin chinese is invaded the world and how it's so it's either 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 and i think for the no doubt the 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 a pro at least another one hundred years or more and i doubt it is going to happen

i think that the world of languages is being repaired that's for sure and i think that 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 now 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 the 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 friend of english is a global language has many many mentions more than just business now the interesting question for me is what if in fifty years time china decides to stop teaching english in its schools would it have the clout then to start forcing countries around it begin with to learn more mandarin start using norm and or and i'm greatly turner ran out of time and maybe we should do a program on the cultural and linguistic germany of mandarin chinese thanks so my guess would be paris copenhagen and in hong kong and thanks to our viewers for watching us here r.t. see you next time. remember prost are. slow.

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