We'll all speak some kind of 'ish' in the future

One of my favourite journalists has a great job title: "writer at large for The Times". His name is Ben Macintyre and he recently described how, while waiting for a flight from Delhi to London, he overheard a conversation between two UN peacekeepers, one Spanish, one Indian. "The Indian spoke no Spanish; the Spaniard spoke no Punjabi. 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," Macintyre wrote, "do I realize that they were speaking 'Globish', the newest and most widely spoken language in the world."

On Monday, 24 May, we'll learn more about this fascinating new lingo, when Globish: How the English Language Became the World's Language is published. The author is Robert McCrum of Britain's Observer newspaper. Globish would not be possible, says McCrum, without English, so he thanks William Shakespeare, Mark Twain, Winston Churchill and Barack Obama for helping to spread it around the planet. A combination of British imperialism and American hegemony, says McCrum, made the language the natural choice for our globalizing world's lingua franca. Everyone wants to learn the language of freedom, democracy, capitalism, Jane Austen and Lady Gaga, right? And because a little controversy is good for book sales, Robert McCrum claims that compared to the snobbish elitism of French, the English language is populist, flexible and viral.

Globish is all of these things, but simpler, which is why it's going to be even bigger than English. Asking for help in Globish will be easier, too.