On a recent trip to Mumbai, India, Tom Russell, publisher of Random House's Living Language learning guides, ran across a commentary in a leading Indian publication that pointed out the hazards of the new "globish" language. It is a term used to describe the awkward English that is often spoken abroad "in fits and starts," he said. "It's just enough for a foreigner to get by in our tongue."

Then [Jean-Paul] Nerriere came to his radical, perhaps revolutionary, conclusion: 'The language non-Anglophones spoke together,' he says, 'was not English, but something vaguely like it.' In this language, he noted, 'we were better off than genuine Anglophones'. This language, he decided, 'was the worldwide dialect of the third millennium'. In a moment of pure inspiration he called it 'Globish' (pronounced 'globe-ish').

Globish is not 'pidgin' or 'broken' English but it is highly simplified and unid- iomatic. Nerriere observes that in Globish you could never say, 'This erstwhile buddy of yours is a weird duck who will probably put the kibosh on all our good deeds.' That might make sense in Acacia Avenue but it will not play in Buenos Aires or Zurich. In Globish you would express this as: 'Your old friend is too strange. He would ruin all our efforts.' Globish, says Nerriere, is 'decaffeinated English, or English-lite'.

On the other hand, English is a notoriously fast and promiscuous mongrel; it absorbs worlds and phrases as fast as it grafts them onto others. Indeed, the "globish" of world youth culture is more and more interactive. Non-Western forms of English now are as creative and lively as Chaucerian or Shakespearean or Dickensian English once were. As a recent British Council report shows, the evolution of the language accelerates as it spreads beyond Anglo-Saxism.