Native speakers must come to terms with the globalization of the English language

[sanahtlig]

BBC: You need to go back to school to relearn English

Quote

“The English language is changing quite radically,” says Gibson. “The trend is not to have one or two clear standard Englishes like American English and British English, but to have a lot of different types of English.”

Chinese English, known as chinglish, and German English, called denglish, are examples, he says. “English is also developing within organisations. In companies, they have their own style of English which is not necessarily understood by native speakers. We are getting away from saying that there is a standard English you need to conform to [towards] saying that there are different standards of English for different situations.”

They go on to argue that non-native English speakers outnumber native English speakers so it's the native speakers that need to conform.

In other words: Steam pages like this are the new normal.  Deal with it.

[Eclipsed]

Makes sense. Usually when I buy some obscure products off of Amazon and read them obscure chinglish instruction manuals I'm like 'dafuq where's ur proofreader' but now i know that's their norm

[Soulless Watcher]

I'm ashamed to say that I didn't notice anything wrong with it until I read it for the third time,  my english fucking sucks. 

[wyldstrykr]

question:

1. what is bad about the sentence in the picture? (didnt read the steam description)

2. Do i need to go back to school and learn English?

[Chronopolis]

What a article bait title. It's just obvious (well, always-present) communication strategies. Learn how to adapt to who you're communicating to.

Edited December 16, 2016 by Chronopolis

[sanahtlig]

21 minutes ago, wyldstrykr said:

question:

1. what is bad about the sentence in the picture? (didnt read the steam description)

2. Do i need to go back to school and learn English?

Original

Quote

Vast world and many dungeons! 
This world, which humans and dragons coexist, is very large with more than 10 cities inside and its landscapes include from forest with full of wildlife to a sunbaked desert. 

Edited

Quote

A vast world with many dungeons to explore! 
The world, in which humans and dragons coexist, is very large and features more than 10 cities.  Dungeon areas range from a forest teeming with wildlife to a sun-scorched desert.

There's also the problem that they're mixing the concepts of "world" and "areas depicted in-game" ("setting in which humans and dragons coexist" vs. "contains 10 cities".  That's not even necessarily a language problem; it's a conceptual flaw in the setting.  They're incapable of contextualizing the region in which the game takes place in terms of the game world as a whole.  In other words: lazy writing.

Edited December 16, 2016 by sanahtlig

[Zenophilious]

Wow, that is a really bad, clickbait-y title.  English is English, if you speak a modified version of it, then it's not really pure English anymore, now is it?

The BBC has gotten pretty clickbaity with less serious news articles as of late.  Quite frankly, it disgusts me.  I hate the effect that sites like BuzzFeed and co. have had on journalism as a whole.

37 minutes ago, sanahtlig said:

In other words: Steam pages like this are the new normal.  Deal with it.

[Okarin]

There's room for maintaining every language that there is, nice and tidy. But, if people don't learn English as a foreign language properly, they'll be bad translators, and the ball will roll downhill.

In the 90s, the videogames' manuals (talking about Sega Genesis/Megadrive) were translated here in Europe to at least six tongues or so, and of course they were well translated. That's a thing to look forward to.

I think it's a matter of skill rather than anything else. As people are now lazier than decades back, they do their work more poorly.

Edited December 16, 2016 by Okarin

[wyldstrykr]

so the sentence is repetitive and inconsistent.... i see

also my problem is lies on reading the sentence, not inside of it... 

[Chronopolis]

As for the steam page...... it's less grammatical errors, and more like an utter lack of appropriate English style.

I actually don't notice it that much. When I'm skimming I'm not judging how it reads, more just picking up keywords. When I read it and pay attention, then it's terrible.

[Nosebleed]

What an awful article. 

Language is always evolving, and English throughout the world is being used in all kinds of different ways, giving us all sorts of English variants. That much should be obvious to anyone who's stepped outside their houses. 

But saying natives have to conform to this? What the hell does that even mean? That they have to learn every single variant or something? That they have to somehow accept these differences as valid in their own variant? That makes no sense. 

More importantly, a language variant still has to abide by rules. You can't simply misuse English and call that a new English variant, there needs to be consistency. Grammatical and vocabulary mistakes foreigners make will keep being mistakes until they're widely used enough to be considered part of a different variant, and when they do they need to stop being called American/British English. 

I'll give you another example. In Portugal we have long accepted the existence and independence of other Portuguese variants in countries like Brazil. But the existence of those doesn't mean we suddenly have to conform the way we speak with the way they speak. That's why now in most media and websites you see European Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese as 2 languages, even though they're mutually intelligible languages.

It does not make sense to say American English or British English must conform to something like German English. First off, German English needs to be accepted as a proper variant of English (I'm not sure of it's current status so I can't say much). Then, once it is, it can easily live separately from the origiating countries. There's nothing wrong with that. But if what you call German English isn't a variant and is really just a name you gave to the way Germans misuse the English language, then it makes no sense to say English natives should conform to it. 

It is important to note I'm not saying English can't have other variants. It absolutely can. And those should be recognized as such. But you can't say everything should be part of one big blob called "English". I think the problem with this article is really just the way the author worded themselves. 

[Darklord Rooke]

1 hour ago, Zenophilious said:

Wow, that is a really bad, clickbait-y title.  English is English, if you speak a modified version of it, then it's not really pure English anymore, now is it?

That's why it's called 'the rise of Globish'. Globish being a simplified form of English international people use to communicate with others from a different background. That is, the simplified version of English (Globish) is being used as a universal language for people to communicate in.

Quote

‘Globish’ is not my word. In the best traditions of the English language, I borrowed it from a Frenchman who first coined it in 1995. Jean-Paul Nerriere was a senior executive with IBM. Posted to Japan in the 1990s, he made one simple, but brilliant, observation. In his work for IBM, Nerriere noticed in meetings that non-native English speakers in the Far East were communicating far more successfully with their Korean and Japanese clients than competing British or American executives, for whom English was the mother tongue. Standard English might be all very well for Anglophone societies, but out there in the developing world, this non-native ‘decaffeinated English’, declared Nerriere, was becoming the new global phenomenon. In a moment of inspiration, he christened it ‘Globish’.

Nerrière was talking about a sort of "decaffeinated English", unencumbered by the rules of grammar and shorn of its rich vocabulary, stripped down to a core set of words that are a means to a single end: comprehensible cross-cultural communication. McCrum deals with the world's English as it is written and spoken across the planet, and explores how and why it came to be such an inextricable part of global consciousness. Globish, he tells us in his prologue, is the biography of this phenomenon.

The term quickly caught on within the international community. The (London) Times journalist Ben Macintyre described a conversation he had overheard while waiting for a flight from Delhi between a Spanish U.N. peacekeeper and an Indian soldier. “The Indian spoke no Spanish; the Spaniard spoke no Punjabi,” he says. “Yet they understood one another easily. The language they spoke was a highly simplified form of English, without grammar or structure, but perfectly comprehensible, to them and to me. Only now do I realize that they were speaking ‘Globish,’ the newest and most widely spoken language in the world.”

The above quote came from a few different articles on Globish I mashed together.

Sanah's article is both right and wrong. The control of the English speaking world to control the direction of English's evolution is being slowly stripped from them, and people started to notice it over a decade ago. 

 

36 minutes ago, Nosebleed said:

More importantly, a language variant still has to abide by rules. You can't simply misuse English and call that a new English variant, there needs to be consistency. Grammatical and vocabulary mistakes foreigners make will keep being mistakes until they're widely used enough to be considered part of a different variant, and when they do they need to stop being called American/British English. 

You'd THINK so, but unfortunately no. Globish ignores much of the grammar and structure that defines English for what it is.

[Nosebleed]

1 hour ago, Darklord Rooke said:

 You'd THINK so, but unfortunately no. Globish ignores much of the grammar and structure that defines English for what it is.

That's the thing though. Language variants exist, but something that has no cohesiveness can not be considered one. For example, if everyone in China speaks a different kind of English, what do you call Chinese English? 

The reason this article ticks me off a little is because it seems to imply every way of using English is totally cool and should be accepted as being part of the current English standards. 

I'll clarify my position on this though:

• Yes, English is a global language and there are more variants appearing
• Yes, those variants need to be recognized as such
• No, that does not mean American or British English (the 2 big English variants) should adopt these variants' rules into their own or that their native speakers have to relearn English 
• No, not every way of using English can be a variant,  some things are just mistakes (it's only when these mistakes are widespread that they can become a standard) .  

English grew so rapidly that its originaring countries didn't properly adapt or consider the appearance of new variants, so a lot of these variants are still in the dark and deemed as broken English. I think the issue here is often the lack of studies around these different variants (which are often just seen as not proper English).  If there were more we could maybe clear some of these issues up.

We can all live in the world with different Englishes, that doesn't mean Americans or British people need to suddenly relearn their English though.

I'd love to one day see grammar guides of Chinese English btw 

[pual]

I think this is agenda pushed by globalists, and not limited to English. In Finland Mikael Jungner just called for huge language reform to conform to refugee's broken Finnish. Translated article.

[WinterfuryZX]

The problem is the opposite, english language is literally cancer spreading methastatis eating away all the other languages.

[Nosebleed]

10 minutes ago, WinterfuryZX said:

The problem is the opposite, english language is literally cancer spreading methastatis eating away all the other languages.

This is also an issue. A lot of minority languages are dying (or are critically endangered) at an increasingly faster rate because of the globalization of languages like English. I don't have the exact numbers on me but in 100 years, at this rate, the diversity of languages in the world will be much smaller. 

There is little support to keep these languages alive though, sadly. It is particularly difficult for languages that have no writing systems (some have even begun adopting one just for the sake of preserving it). 

I wouldn't say this is an argument against the globalization of a language though. But it is important to take the problems that come with it in consideration and then work to mitigate them. 

[Darklord Rooke]

Sometimes though it’s unrealistic to keep all the smaller languages.

For example, India has 1,500 languages and 22 official languages (Assamese, Bengali, Bodo, Dogri, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Kashmiri, Konkani, Maithilli, Malayalam, Manipuri, Marathi, Nepali, Odia, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Santali, Sindhi, Tamil, Telugu, and Urdu.) This diversity, while culturally rich, becomes a hindrance in practical matters. As in, the language changes depending what village you visit o.0

[Nosebleed]

9 minutes ago, Darklord Rooke said:

Sometimes though it’s unrealistic to keep all the smaller languages.

For example, India has 1,500 languages and 22 official languages (Assamese, Bengali, Bodo, Dogri, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Kashmiri, Konkani, Maithilli, Malayalam, Manipuri, Marathi, Nepali, Odia, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Santali, Sindhi, Tamil, Telugu, and Urdu.) This diversity, while culturally rich, becomes a hindrance in practical matters. As in, the language changes depending what village you visit o.0

Yes, that is why they die off,  they begin adopting a language to communicate with other communities and stop using their native language, thus not passing it to the next generation, thus killing it. But that cultural value is still important to take into consideration, that's why there are organizations dedicated to creating ways to preserve minority languages. They are part of human history and should, at the very least, be properly studied and documented (most languages in the world don't even have a writing system, meaning they basically have nothing to leave behind once they disappear). One of my college teachers was part of an organization that worked to create a writing system for a certain African language, because it was in risk of dying. I think projects like this are awesome and should be encouraged. 

I know it seems like I'm just being pedantic, but killing off part of a culture to me is a bit sad. Plus a world that only uses one or two languages is boring

[Okarin]

About what Nosebleed said before about British English and American English, well, those two originated in Britain and have had like 200 years to evolve separately. Separated by a whole huge ocean. Much as Brazilian Portuguese and Portugal's Portuguese. Or Mexican Spanish and Spain's Spanish.

But English as a foreign language has been taught worldwide from several decades ago. It hasn't had time to evolve distinctly. And, like Nosebleed said, don't confuse mistakes with distinct speaking patterns. No two Germans speak the same English, I guess? There's no need to separate English into 6 billion dialects. Hell, not even C3PO could keep track of them!

Also, it should make sense for European English speakers to use the British variant, for American speakers to use American, and for people close to Australia to use Australian, if only for proximity and exposure to the local variant.

[WinterfuryZX]

1 hour ago, Darklord Rooke said:

Sometimes though it’s unrealistic to keep all the smaller languages.

For example, India has 1,500 languages and 22 official languages (Assamese, Bengali, Bodo, Dogri, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Kashmiri, Konkani, Maithilli, Malayalam, Manipuri, Marathi, Nepali, Odia, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Santali, Sindhi, Tamil, Telugu, and Urdu.) This diversity, while culturally rich, becomes a hindrance in practical matters. As in, the language changes depending what village you visit o.0

In Italy there are shitload of languages too, standard Italian is an adjusted revision of old Florentine and was imposed after the first unification in 1861 (the Kingdom of italy needed a unified language known by all its citizens, for practical reasons), all the other languages survived to this day and are still used by the locals, they are slovly dying, though. If I'd been born 200 years ago my first language should have been this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emilian-Romagnol_language (it doesn't even exist standardized, there are many different dialects). Since this language is not teached in schools and is rarely used by young people, very few of my generation can speak it fluently, also writing is extremely difficult and limited to a small circle of enthusiasts.

[atorq]

4 hours ago, pual said:

I think this is agenda pushed by globalists, and not limited to English. In Finland Mikael Jungner just called for huge language reform to conform to refugee's broken Finnish. Translated article.

The difference here is that English is actually a global language whereas Finnish is understood and spoken by less than 6 million, i.e. not a global language as I'm sure many Finns will be surprised to hear. And it's not like Finnish couldn't use a good reform to make it simpler to learn and use.

[Benji Price]

I do can tell you how a language can be cancer.

Spanish should be a single language, but I haven't met any people from different countries that speak the same way. I mean, I'm from Argentina and when I visited colombia it was a pain to understand people, same happened in Bolivia and the worst was Chile... Oh god, they just took the language said "oh well, lets just do whatever the fuck we want with this crappy language and lets everyone else suffer for talking to us".

English could not be an exception. Way too globalized.

[Shota_Victory]

Funny. I was just looking at this yesterday: http://www.npr.org/blogs/ombudsman/Politics_and_the_English_Language-1.pdf

[Dark_blade64]

1 hour ago, Benji Price said:

I do can tell you how a language can be cancer.

Spanish should be a single language, but I haven't met any people from different countries that speak the same way. I mean, I'm from Argentina and when I visited colombia it was a pain to understand people, same happened in Bolivia and the worst was Chile... Oh god, they just took the language said "oh well, lets just do whatever the fuck we want with this crappy language and lets everyone else suffer for talking to us".

English could not be an exception. Way too globalized.

So you are saying people should accomodate their language to your superior sophisticated tastes because you don't like it? You know what? I find latin spanish crappy as hell in terms of how it sounds, and I think it really sound stupidly annoying, but does that mean they should change a whole language system just to cater to people who hate it? Then in that case, I propose those know it all bastards to freaking do something instead of just keep complaining over and over again like they are over top of the world, how other people should only respect their feelings but when things aren't going favorably for them they go immediately to the defensive and gather in small groups to prove they are right and the other side is wrong.

[Benji Price]

48 minutes ago, Dark_blade64 said:

So you are saying people should accomodate their language to your superior sophisticated tastes because you don't like it? You know what? I find latin spanish crappy as hell in terms of how it sounds, and I think it really sound stupidly annoying, but does that mean they should change a whole language system just to cater to people who hate it? Then in that case, I propose those know it all bastards to freaking do something instead of just keep complaining over and over again like they are over top of the world, how other people should only respect their feelings but when things aren't going favorably for them they go immediately to the defensive and gather in small groups to prove they are right and the other side is wrong.

All I meant is that not only in english there are differences between way native people from different countries speak it and people who learns it (which is always the correct way).

Never said anyone should fit their language, I just stated that if it was hard for me (a native) to understand it'd be harder for people who are not.

If you disliked my opinion (or feel offended by it) you could've have said so in a less agressive way. I don't think that's the way to engage a discussion.