The New York Times’s Noam Cohen has an interesting story about efforts to advance a simplified version of English to be used around the world — what some are calling “globish.”
When its president proposed last month to ban English words like “helicopter,” “chat” and “pizza,” Iran became the latest country to try to fight the spread of English as a de facto global language.
But with interest in English around the world growing stronger, not weaker — stoked by American cultural influences and advertising, the increasing numbers of young people in developing countries and the spread of the Internet, among other factors — there are some linguists and others who say: why fight it? Instead, the argument goes, English, particularly the simpler form of the language used by most nonnative speakers, should be embraced.
Esperanto teachers world-wide must be totally bummed out by this turn of events.