English and free trade

This week I read an article in The Economist newspaper about Tseda Neeley, a professor at Harvard who believes all employees of multinational companies all over the world should be required to speak English. Her main reason is that it is more efficient. Whereas multilingualism is inefficient. The Economist suggests that there may well be good reasons for international businesses using English. For example, it is the main language of science: nearly all influential scientific articles are written in or translated into English so that people all over the world can comment on and contribute to research. The newspaper also reminds us that many multinational companies began in English-speaking countries, including Britain, Australia and, above all, America. Moreover, English-speaking countries supply over 25% of the world’s GDP. In Japan some companies already require all or many of their employees to use English. One of them is Nissan, which manufactures cars in 18 countries.

The policy started when the company went into partnership with the French car firm Renault in 1999. Since few Nissan workers speak French and few Renault employees speak Japanese, having English as the main working language largely avoids the need for translators. Another example is the huge e-commerce company Rakuten. Although based in Japan, the company has connections all over the world. According The Economist, even the menus in the staff canteen are in English. However, The Economist does not think it is a good idea to force employees use English. This London-based newspaper generally takes a free-market approach to the world, whether financial, social or cultural policies. As far as language goes, it argues that people may be motivated to learn English because of business opportunities, but there is no need to force them. A lot of Japanese are forced to learn English nowadays, whether at work or at school. But I wonder how helpful this approach is. Some linguists, such as Jean-Louis Calvet in France, compare languages to currencies and argue that some have more value in the marketplace than others. The question is whether we should interfere in the market or let exchanges take place freely.

Many people feel it is acceptable to interfere in markets in order to protect the weak and the small. In this sense perhaps there may some need to protect minority languages against the expansion of major languages like English, Spanish and Chinese. But it could also be said that making people use English whether they want to or not is an unnecessary interference in the market - on behalf of a currency that is already strong enough. Or perhaps it is just a way of helping people deal with the needs of the global economy?

Not quite everywhere

With English becoming a part of life for all kinds of people all around Asia, I sometimes wonder if there are still areas where it is of little importance. I certainly hope there are at least a few left! Well, last week I found one. I attended a Malay wedding at a town near the capital of Kuala Lumpur, where English is widely spoken alongside Malay, Chinese or Tamil. I was accompanying Malaysian friends who regularly use English both at work and in their social life. But for the few hours that I was there, the only English I heard was when people addressed me.

The happy couple and their families were Malay , so not surprisingly this was the main language. The wedding invitation had been sent out in Malay, the banners and signs were in Malay, the MC gave his announcements and told his jokes in Malay, and I did my best to speak Malay - though, typically, most people, except for the older ones, replied to me in English. (While Indonesians seem happy enough to talk to foreigners in their national language, most Malaysian rapidly switch to English.)

There was also some Arabic in the ceremonial functions and the greetings people gave to one another. In Malaysia, all Malays are Muslim, and matters regarding marriage, family affairs and inheritance are regulated according to Muslim law and tradition, so the Arabic language plays an indispensable part in Malay life.

Then there was one more language there that at first I didn't notice: Minang. This is a language related to Malay spoken widely in western Sumatra as well as in some Minang migrant communities that have settled in other parts of Indonesia or in Malaysia. Nowadays few people in Malaysia speak it, but it survives there in songs and sayings and ceremonies. As in almost any wedding anywhere, the celebrations were punctuated by songs, with enthusiastic audience participation, and a number of these were in Minang.

Which reminds me, English was not entirely absent, in fact. Towards the end of the afternoon when younger members of the audience got up to sing, they tended to favour current English-language favourites.

As for me, I used to spend time in Sumatra and know a couple of Minang songs. But - perhaps fortunately - no one asked me to go up and sing...in any language.

Maintaining heritage languages

A great many Asians migrate to English-speaking countries every year. In 2004, 12% of the people living in the United States were born overseas, and about a quarter of these were Asians (the second biggest group after Latin Americans). Between 1990 and 2000, the Chinese American community nearly doubled, from 1.6 million to 2.9 million. Koreans increased from 100,000 in 1970 to 1.2 million in 2000. In Canada, Asians comprised almost half of immigrants in 2004. Bryan Ray of the University of Ottawa notes how this has reversed the pattern of the 1970s when two thirds came from Europe and only 12% from Asia. In Australia 7.2% claimed Asian ancestry in the 2001 census, and over 10% in the city of Sydney.

Asian immigrants tend to have a positive image in the countries they migrate to. Their children often do better than average at school, even though English may not be the language spoken at home. This success is often attributed to a traditional emphasis on education and in particular to the networks of community schools they have established. But ironically, these schools seem to have been less successful in achieving the purpose for which most of them were originally set up: to maintain the heritage language of their parents or grandparents.

According to Richard Alba of New York State University, only a minority of immigrants maintain bilingualism into the third generation, and the numbers of bilingual Asians is especially low. A few decades ago, it was commonly believed that raising children bilingually was likely to confuse them and impede their progress at school. Many immigrants to English-speaking countries wanted their children to use English only. Nowadays, few doubt the benefits of bilingualism, not just because of the access it gives to different cultures and ways of looking at the world, but because bilinguals often seem to do better than average academically and to be more flexible and adaptable. Nevertheless the difficulty of raising children to be balanced bilinguals is often underestimated.

Koreans in the United States are known as high achievers both in schoolwork and in music. As well as attending English-medium schools, many get extra education in Korean at hagwon cram schools. Yet 78% of US-born Koreans use only English at home. Korean-language schools are heavily concentrated in a few areas, such as Los Angeles. Moreover, the pressure to do well at school means that many students concentrate all their efforts on studying only in English.

At first sight, the 10,000 Japanese in Sydney seem to do better at maintaining their heritage language. Oriyama Kaya of Victoria University in New Zealand found that nearly 9000 of them claim to speak Japanese well. Many of the children go to hoshuukoo, or special Japanese schools that supplement the classes they take at local English-medium schools. The Australian government provides funding if there are more than 20 students. However, the high level of Japanese is largely accounted for by the fact that most Japanese families do not settle permanently.

According to Nakane Ikuko of Melbourne University, the proportion of Japanese who emigrate long-term is now increasing, and their children, more of whom are being born in Australia and going to English-medium schools, are consequently using less Japanese. Discussions I had with Japanese residents of Auckland suggest that the picture is similar in New Zealand, with short-term residents able to maintain proficiency in Japanese but those settling down there starting to shift towards English.



The Australian government is increasingly concerned about another community of Asian immigrants, the Lebanese. Rosemary Suliman of the University of West Sydney claims that far from being bilingual, many Lebanese children are semilingual: unable to read or write Arabic and speaking it less and less with their parents, yet falling behind at school because they are not fully exposed to English until later than the other children.

The Tamils who left Sri Lanka during the recent civil war are finding it particularly difficult to maintain their language in countries such as Canada, the US and the UK. Suresh Canagarajah of Baluch College in New York found that while 38% of the younger generation in Toronto, where there are over 150,000 Sri Lankan Tamils, use both languages, but 41% now mostly use English. The picture is similar among the 50,000 Tamils in London, with 44% favouring English and only 36% preferring Tamil. One of the reasons for the shift is that many feel it is unlikely they will ever go back to Sri Lanka after the bitter divisions of years of ethnic conflict.

Medium of instruction

Bhutan and Singapore may be the only Asian countries with English-medium national education systems.


However, there are several other countries, especially former British or American colonies, where English is not taught as a foreign language but used rather as the medium to teach certain subjects. In Brunei secondary schools, English is used more than the ‘national language’. In the Philippines and Malaysia it is used for science and maths, with more culturally- or socially-orientated subjects taught in the national languages. English is the main medium of instruction in many Indian secondary schools and most universities. Gandhi once complained that he could have mastered maths and science in half the time if he had been allowed to study them in his native Gujerati .

Interestingly, English is starting to be used as a medium instruction in some countries that were never anglophone colonies. In China’s Guandong Province, for instance, 200 state school have been teaching certain subjects in English since 2003. English-medium instruction is expanding particularly fast in the private sector.

Beijing’s Harrow and Eton international schools (named after prestigious British schools) were originally targeted at foreign residents but are increasingly popular with wealthier Chinese.

Harrow also has a branch in Thailand. Some Bangkok schools have an English-medium stream for children whose parents pay higher fees. They also get air-conditioning for their extra money.

Not surprisingly, the practice of paying extra to have children educated in English is controversial. On the one hand, many parents say they should be free to give their children what they see as an important advantage for their future. Some feel that since most scientific research is published in English nowadays their children should study it in that language from the start. A recent letter to the Malaysian online newspaper Malaysiakini claimed that children liked studying science in English because there was far more scientific information on the internet in English than in Malay.

On the other hand, for over fifty years there has been a consensus among educators that any subject is best taught in one’s mother tongue, at least when children are younger. Some parents fear that standards of maths and science will decline if they are taught in a second or foreign language, without any compensatory improvement in English standards. One contributor to Malaysiakini described how the teachers at one school had to simplify content when they were ordered to teach in English ten years ago. This is in contrast to a 2010 UN report suggesting that not only English, but also science and maths, had started to improve in Malaysian schools after the introduction of English instruction. Another contributor pointed out that science and maths standards are high in countries like China and Taiwan, where they are not taught in English, than in the Philippines and Malaysia, where they are.

In addition to pedagogical arguments, the debate over medium of instruction has economic, social and political dimensions. English-medium instruction can divide societies between the English-speaking rich and urban and the non-English speaking poor and rural. In this sense, countries like China and Thailand are not so different from former British and American colonies. When Malaysia started teaching maths and science in English ten years go the new policy was popular in cities like Kuala Lumpur and Penang, and even persuaded some parents to keep their children in the state sector rather than send them to private schools. But it was less popular in the countryside, where many teachers did not know English well enough to teach in it and children had few opportunities to use English outside school.

Malaysia recently decided to go back to teaching everything in Malay. So now it is parents in the cities who are unhappy. The basic problem lies in trying to have one policy for the whole country, when the circumstances of each area and even each family differ so much. But many politicians, and even some educators, say it is quite natural for a country to have one common national language policy.

“Only English speakers need apply”

If you ask an Asian student why they study Spanish or Japanese you will probably get a variety of responses. But if you ask why they study English there are two answers that always come at the top of their list: Because it is compulsory. And To get a job. But is it true that English will help you get a job? We have to consider two types of workers: those who go overseas in search of work, and those who stay home.

During a visit to Dubai the only worker I encountered who wasn’t a foreigner was the immigration officer who stamped my passport on arrival. Clearly English was indispensable to most of the hotel employees, such as the Sri Lankan staff at the taxi desk and fitness club and the Filipino receptionists. Even the Nepalese room-cleaners and Indian cooks could manage basic conversation. I was a little surprised to see that the only job ads I saw in Gulf News that specifically asked for English were for security guards, but I imagine that is because it is so obviously necessary for accountants and executives that the ads don’t even mention it.


However, I never got to talk to any of the thousands of construction workers and manual labourers in Dubai. The likelihood is that they don’t need much English in their jobs. They probably don’t need much Arabic either, being supervised by middlemen speaking their language and living with compatriots (around the city you come across posters offering “bed spaces for Nepali bachelors” or other specific nationalities). Willingness to work for low wages, rather than English, is surely what recruiters in Israel are looking for when they take on Thais to work on agricultural kibbutzim there.

Malaysia is trying to make basic English a requirement for all foreign workers but perhaps they should focus on Malay instead. I once sat on a plane next to a Burmese man coming to work as a builder in a small Malaysian city. He was studying an English-language booklet for immigrant workers published by the Malaysian government but I wonder how often he would need to use English. For a middle-sized developing country, Malaysia has a relatively large proportion of foreign workers. The waiters and hotel staff in the centre of the capital city are definitely employed mainly for their English skills. But the foreign workers employed in factories or on construction sites probably won’t need it much.

What about Asians looking for a job in their own country? Where English is widely used in business, such as Singapore, Malaysia and the Philippines, not knowing it well makes it almost impossible to get a well-paid job. Multinational companies in Thailand pay on average twice as well as local firms, so there is no shortage of people spending money on English courses they can ill afford in the hope of switching to one. However, English shouldn’t be a key factor for getting a job with a local firm in a country where business is mostly done in a local language. And yet it often is.

Beijing Time Out, a magazine aimed at foreign residents but read by many young Chinese, often carries advertisements for bilingual receptionists at small hair salons where few customers are likely to be foreigners. Nowadays most Korean students spend one or two semesters overseas, whatever their major, because they know companies may evaluate them according to their English proficiency – even if they won’t actually need to use the language at work.

Things used to be very different in Japan. Many students were actually reluctant to spend time overseas because they feared the delay would harm their chances of getting a job. Indeed the number of Japanese studying overseas has declined in recent years as the economic crisis there has worsened. This is partly because people do not have as much money as they used to. But it is also because competition for jobs in Japan has become so tough.

However, there are signs that things are changing. Many Japanese companies want employees with high TOEFL or TOEIC scores. In some cases English may be important for them to compete with foreign companies. In other cases, they simply want some way of narrowing down the thousands of students who apply for just one or two positions. Students themselves are also beginning to feel they may need English to work in Japan, because so many Japanese companies are hiring foreign staff nowadays (especially Chinese who can speak Mandarin, Japanese and English). Furthermore, students who have not been able to get a job may feel that they might as well go and study overseas rather than stay in Japan unemployed.

Whether it actually leads to better job prospects or not, my prediction is that the number of Japanese going overseas to study is set to increase again.

Globish (2): Some questions

Last time I wrote about Nerriere and Hon’s book on Globish. I like their idea that we need a simple tool for international communication. I agree that I sold the house to that man is easier than He’s the man I sold the house to and it means almost the same thing. But I have some questions.

Does Globish really not have any cultural viewpoint?
Nerriere and Hon use some words that are not in their list and not explained. It is not unreasonable for them to assume that words like phone are already global. After all, the French say téléphone and Germans Telefon, and Japanese used to say terehon kad (with mobile phones almost no one uses a telephone card now). But for Japanese, ‘phone’ is usually denwa or keitai, for Chinese it is dianhua or shouji, for Thais, torasap. Deciding what is ‘international’ does involve cultural assumptions and generalisations.

Is Globish enough to explain technical things'?
They explain many ‘technical’ words that are not on their list using Globish. But they do not explain 'technical' until page 35. The explanation is ‘tied to a trade or an industry.’ Is this enough?

Is correct spelling so very important?
They say English spelling rules are too difficult, but we need only 1500 words, so we only need to learn the spelling of these. English spelling is indeed difficult and the words in their list include some of the most difficult. (In fact, longer and more difficult words are often easier to spell.) But most incorrect spelling is close to how words sound, so I can usually guess words that are spelt incorrectly. But maybe I think like this because I make many spelling mistakes!

Are short sentences easier than long ones?
They also say it is best to use short sentences. So Globish is very useful for short messages, like the ones we send from our phones. At the back of the book they change a speech by Barack Obama into Globish. The Globish version might be easier. But it is much longer.



Is it easier to learn one expression with several meanings than to learn several words with one meaning?
For them, the center of Globish is limiting the words we use and making sure everyone understand basic words. It’s not a bad idea. In fact it is an old idea. Basic English, invented 80 years ago, has 850. Perhaps it is easier to learn 'go up' instead of 'ascend', and 'go out' instead of 'exit'. But 'go off' can mean 'depart' or 'explode' (which are in the Globish list) and 'rot' and 'proceed' (which are not). And is 'sleeping without clothes' clearer than 'sleeping without pajamas' or 'sleeping naked'? At first that expression was not easy for me to work out.

Are short words easier than long ones?
I tried to write these two entries about Globish in Globish. But when I checked my writing, I had to change 'advantage' to 'edge' and 'mentioned' to 'wrote in passing'. But I am not sure if these are easier to understand. Both 'edge' and 'pass' have a lot of different meanings.

If we know part of a word, is it easy to understand all of it?
To my surprise, 'adaptable', 'entry', 'expression', 'figurative' and 'guideline' are all in the Globish list - because it has 'adapt', 'enter', 'express', 'figure', 'guide' and 'line'. If we know 'mind' and 'set', do we understand 'mindset'? I am still not sure if I should use 'activity' or 'effectively' or 'maybe' (the list has 'act', 'effect', 'may', and 'be').

However, Nerriere and Hon say that few native speakers of English fully understand how useful Globish is, so my questions may be unreasonable. I would like to hear the opinions of ESL speakers.

Globish (1): Some good ideas

In the entry on international understanding 18 months ago I wrote in passing about Globish. This is a simplified English that Jean-Paul Nerriere observed non-native speakers using effectively with each other when he worked for IBM. By chance I just came across a book that he and David Hon wrote about this. Of course they wrote it in Globish – with a few additional words that they explain in Globish, like pajamas and punctuation.

The first part of the book is about why we need Globish. In an increasingly globalized world, more and more people use English. Most are non-native speakers. They have no time, and no need, to use English like native speakers. But they can learn Globish easily. Globish cannot take the place of English for Americans and Britons. It cannot take the place of Spanish for South Americans, or Hindi for Indians. But it is enough for most international communication.

Nerriere and Hon also explain how non-native speakers of English have an edge over native speakers. They are more adaptable. They are used to hearing different kinds of English. They know how to make good use of simple words. And because they are using a foreign language, they are not forcing their own cultural ideas upon anyone.

The second part of the book gives some details about what Globish is. There are few hard rules, but there are guidelines. For example:

We need only 1500 words. (They give us a list.)
We should use short sentences.
We can improve understanding with body language when speaking.
We can improve understanding with punctuation when writing.
We should avoid figurative language.
We should use the active voice. (He wrote it, not It was written by him.)
We should avoid humor. (Unless we know our listeners well.)
We should spell correctly.
We should stress words correctly.

But we do not need to sound like native speakers. A 2009 experiment showed about seven sounds that are difficult for most non-native speakers to say. Native speakers and other non-native speakers may not understand them when non-native speakers say them. If we master these sounds and use stress correctly, it is enough.

Globish is a good idea. It is similar to other ideas that I wrote about before, like EIL. I agree with many of its aims. I do not think all English should be like American or British English. And I do not think native speakers always communicate better than non-native speakers. However, I also have some problems with Globish. I will write about them in the next entry.