I WAS RECENTLY waiting for a flight in Delhi, when I overheard a conversation between a Spanish UN peacekeeper and an Indian soldier. 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 do I realise that they were speaking “Globish”, the newest and most widely spoken language in the world.

Globish is not like Esperanto or Volapuk; this is not a formally constructed language, but rather an organic patois, constantly adapting, emerging solely from practical usage, and spoken in some form or other by about 88 per cent of mankind. Its chief promoter, astonishingly enough, is a Frenchman, Jean-Paul Nerrière, a linguist and retired computer executive who has earned the loathing of the French Establishment by insisting that Globish — simple, inelegant and almost universal — is the language of the present and the future. In his primer, Parlez Globish, Nerrière points out that Globish is not intended for writing poetry or telling jokes, but for communication at the most basic level. It is not a language in the traditional sense, freighted with cultural meaning, but a supremely useful and ingenious tool, the linguistic equivalent of a Swiss Army knife.

The Frenchman has calculated that the speaker of Globish needs to pronounce and understand no more than 1,500 words, starting with “able” and ending in “zero”. The entire vocabulary of Globish amounts to less than one four-hundredth of the words in the OED. Starting from scratch, anyone in the world should be able to learn Globish in about one week. Nerrière’s website (www.jpn-globish.com) also recommends that students use plenty of gesticulation when words fail, and listen to popular songs to aid pronunciation, including such unlikely language aids as What a Wonderful World and The Great Pretender. (What happens if one Globish speaker has an Elvis accent and the other speaks with a Satchmo twang? Will they understand one another, or do they need to simplify down to another level, and speak in Sex Pistols?)

Language purists are naturally appalled by the emergence of this pidgin worldspeak, a mongrel tongue without structure and rules, pared down to its most rudimentary form. Facing the inevitable, the French Government decreed last year that English lessons should be made compulsory for all French schoolchildren: better to have English taught correctly than allow “airport English” to seep into French culture. But the central dilemma was summed up by a cartoon in Le Monde : “If they force us to do English, then we’ll speak only French,” one student says in French. “Yeah,” replies his friend. Globish is already le Must among modish young Parisians.

If the French are anxious, how much more worried should the guardians of the English language be, faced by a spreading and debased version of our own tongue? As Nerrière points out: “Globiphones are already at least seven times more populous than anglophones.” Is the mother tongue about to be overrun by her lumbering bastard offspring? Not a bit of it, because commensurate with the explosion of Globish is an equally powerful, and widely accepted determination to protect the central elements of real languages. Nerrière argues that the new global patois will actually protect French, by driving out franglais, thus leaving “pure” French to survive unsullied.

Globish has been partly spread by the internet, yet the computer is also becoming the guardian of “good” English. Everyone who writes using the Microsoft Word program (ie, just about everyone who writes anything) is under constant surveillance by the inbuilt spell and grammar checker, wagging its electronic finger whenever we deviate from the rules. It is like having Lynne Truss living permanently inside your computer.

Microsoft Word is supposed to enforce correct English, but even the infallible computer gets it wrong. Type in “I am agreeable with what this column say”, and the grammar check does not object at all. But type in the first line of Pride and Prejudice, “It is a truth universally acknowledged . . .” and it starts insisting you simplify, and add commas. Almost anything written by Henry James or Hunter S. Thompson sends it into a hissy fit.

This demonstrates the malleability of the language, as interesting English need not be correct English. The astonishing spread of the language in a single generation has allowed it to evolve more fascinatingly than any other: think of Indian-English, which is in many ways a more inventive and grammatically pure version of the language than the one spoken in Britain. “Incorrect” English can be extraordinarily rich, and non-standard forms of the language are developing outside the West in ways that are as lively and diverse as Chaucerian or Dickensian English.

(Some French linguists argue that if Napoleon had not made the mistake of selling Louisiana to the US, we would all be speaking French today or, rather, a simplified version of it: Mondais, perhaps. I don’t believe this, for French has never had English’s adaptability and adoptability.)

Globish is not the end of the language, but an important step on the evolutionary ladder, and for many an introduction to the world. The 1,500 basic words of Globish serve as an invitation to find the other 613,000 in the OED, as proven by the extraordinary and growing demand for English instruction worldwide. A recent British Council survey found that the language evolves ever faster as it spreads beyond traditional Anglo-Saxon usage: so far from threatening minority languages, Globish and its myriad local variants may serve to protect those threatened with extinction.

Jacques Chirac was right when he declared that nothing would be more damaging for humanity than for all its 7,000 languages to be reduced to one. He was referring to English. But Globish is not quite a language: it is a means to an end, a way of bringing millions into a global economy without the privilege of formal education, a world dialect, an international über-slang that, for the most part, leaves local languages intact. It may be a limited form of communication, but at least Globish means that we are talking to each other. “Don’t shoot, I’m Globish”: now there is a phrase that needs no translation, anywhere.

Join the Debate
Send your e-mails to debate@thetimes.co.uk

Times Recommends

• Tear down this wall! And save the planet
• Double click if you want the bin emptied
• Have you got permission to read this?