Two linquistic innovators have invented a type of Pig-English. It's called "Globish," and it's meant to provide a simplified form of English as the world's lingua franca. Link (registration required). Excerpts:
In the 20th century English spread across the globe, partly on the back of American films, songs and popular culture. This has prompted resentment among some, particularly the French.
So the publication about a year ago by a retired French computer engineer, Jean-Paul Nerrière, of a book called Don't Speak English - Parlez Globish was met with some dismay in his own country.
His Globish is essentially a stripped-down, simplified form of English with a vocabulary of just 1500 words.
A few years earlier, another engineer, Indian Madhukar Gogate, put forward his own proposal to iron out English spelling and pronunciation irregularities in a form that non-native speakers might more easily understand.
A Melbourne University linguistics professor, Michael Clyne, said such efforts were doomed, because English in various forms had already established itself as the international means of communication.
He said that although English was widely used, it often took a form that native speakers of English had difficulty understanding because they were usually monolingual and did not understand how another speaker might pronounce the language.
