Peter Krouse has written a strange article based on the thoughts of Mac Watson, chairman of the Business division at Baldwin-Wallace College in Ohio. [via Universal Language via Language Hat] In essence, there are a lot of non-native speakers of English out there, and what they speak oftentimes sounds different from standard American English. Well, true enough, but … The article then mentions English as a second language (ESL), and says bluntly: "But the ESL version is simpler and without the slang and idioms that native speakers unconsciously use every day." Yeah, sure, and ESL doesn't use metaphor either. The article confuses near-pidgins (like "Chinglish") with "fractured English," and then mixes them up with ESL and American businessmen's English. The tortured logic and linguistics of this article are just too much for me. Yes, if I were trying to close a business deal with a non-native speaker of English whose command of the language was less than fluent, I would try my best to use simple sentence structure, a vocabulary limited by the subject of our discourse, and not too many idioms. But, if non-native English speakers say something that I don't understand, I doubt it has much to do with the simplicity of their ESL or with their choice of idioms, and more to do with faulty phonology, syntax, morphology, or perhaps literally translating idioms from their first language into English.
Posted by jim at July 23, 2003 09:46 AM