First of all, the English spoken in India or Singapore is not some form of “Globish”, it’s English, albeit an Indian or respectively Singaporean variant. English is one of several official languages in both India and Singapore. To claim that the English spoken by people in these countries is not proper English at all is as condescending and frankly incorrect as my old English teacher was when he claimed that American English was not proper English. There are regional differences and varieties within every language, let alone one spoken not just in different countries but on different continents. This does not mean that one variety is superior or somehow more real than the others. Besides, Singaporean English is perfectly comprehensible in spite of some regional specifics.

And the claim that international speakers speak only a simplified form of English “without grammar” is an insult to non-native speakers of English everywhere. Are there a lot of international business people who speak bad English? Of course there are. In my work as a translator I run into those people every day. But McCrumb nonetheless gets the phenomenon completely wrong. People using English mainly for business interactions do not have a rudimentary vocabulary. Most of the time, they have a highly specified vocabulary tailored to the needs of their profession. I have met non-native speakers of English who could explain the functions of some very complicated machinery in detail but did not know such common words as “fairy” or “squirrel”, because they did not need those words to do their jobs. As for grammar, it really depends on the grammar instruction a non-native speaker received. Many of them have got a very good handle on grammar, some do not. And considering that particularly Americans are notoriously bad at identifying grammatical phenomenons (e.g. all of that confusion regarding what is and isn’t passive voice – Thank you, Strunk and White), native speakers aren’t necessarily better. They usually have the instincts acquired during language acquisition, but they are often worse at explaining the rules, because they never formally learned them. My 8th grade ESL students are often better at correctly identifying the passive voice than some adult native speakers, including published writers.

Finally, this article is also a slap into the face of all of us non-native speakers who have invested a lot of time into studying the English language in all its varieties and subtleties and – if we are teachers – passing it on to our students. When I teach English, I take great care to teach not just vocabulary and grammar but also the history and culture behind the language. I consider it my job to teach the whole spectrum of English, not just some simplified “Globish”.