Next up on our must read list is Globish - How the English Language Became the World's Language by Robert McCrum.
NY Time review.
and Howard Shapiro's review at philly.com
To anyone who travels beyond the United States, it's not news that, for better or worse, English has become the world's language.
No longer will people abroad automatically let you try out your French or Spanish or Japanese at the start of an everyday transaction in a restaurant, or shop, where your American-tinged tongue is more likely to draw an immediate English response, no questions asked. Sure, there remain places where this rarely happens. They are not the world's cities. And they are likely to be remote.
Well, good for us, you might say, we can be understood, a primary benefit of being human.
Well, bad for the world, you might say; it is becoming less diverse as English becomes the universal lingua franca.
Language not only defines a national culture, it also gives its speakers the tools to turn thoughts into something concrete - and among the beauties of different languages is that they offer different ways of doing so.
Robert McCrum, associate editor of Britain's Observer, is not out to wow us with old news about the ever-progressing global advance of English. Instead, his book is a thoroughly researched, cleverly told big-picture tale of how our language got to be that way - and just what that way means: ungovernable, he says, taken for granted, ever-changing.
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