“Do you speak Globlish?” (or the perils of phrasal verbs)

This week’s post was supposed to be a Part Two of last week’s musings on corporate storytelling, but I’ve been sidetracked. After spending much of the last three days developing an internal video project aimed at our managers around the world, I’ve been giving a lot of thought to what type of English you need to use for a global audience.

The problem raised its ugly head early on in the process. The film involves a dozen or so employees – French, Italian, Indian, German and British - delivering lines to camera. Most of the people watching it will not speak English as a first language. If this sounds something like the joke about an Englishman, an Italian and a Frenchman walk into a bar, that’s because it is.

Most discussions on the ‘type’ of English to use in corporate communications are variations on the age-old British versus American English debate. Everyone has their own rules. Mine is that if your audience is Western Europe, go with British; if you’re widening it out to the rest of Europe, American wins out marginally; and if your audience is global, then only American will do. Above all, choose one and stick to it: there’s nothing more irritating to a linguistic pedant than a piece of writing schizophrenically spattered with ‘z’s and ‘s’s. It’s one of the reasons I hate the Paris metro.

In fact the real language of international English is not American English at all. It’s Globlish. Using American English as a starting point, you need to eliminate all the vocabulary and structures that get in the way of a non-native speaker understanding what you’re trying to say. At a basic level, this means getting rid of cultural references masquerading as words. (For example, the French describe sticky tape as “Scotch”. The English call it “Sellotape”. Why? Because the two rival brands got a foothold in each country at a different time). You also need to shorten sentences – although this is good practice anyway. But the real holy grail is complete elimination of phrasal verbs.

You may not even have heard of phrasal verbs if you’re a native speaker. When you were growing up, you probably got away with learning no grammar, looking up the odd term in the dictionary when you were looking to impress someone, and generally you’d get away with it.

As a non-native speaker… well, after years of painstaking study, you probably still wouldn’t understand that last sentence.

Make up, run out, set up… English is full of dastardly combinations of deceptively simple verbs and prepositions which mean something entirely different when strung together. So whereas passing out might be the unfortunate consequence of a typically British bout of binge-drinking, passing away is altogether more serious.

As a global communicator you need to banish these words from your vocabulary. This is very hard, because most native speakers, when urged to make things simple, fall back on Anglo-Saxon vocabulary, which is mainly made up of… that’s right, phrasal verbs. It’s one of the irritating reasons that foreigners often understand other foreigners speaking English better than they understand the real thing. To speak Globlish is to tread the fine dividing line between straightforward, simple English and the easy Latinate alternatives – “tolerate” instead of “put up with” for example - that, used excessively, will catapult your writing into a bizarre Franglish translation.