Lingua Franca (I saw Tobey Maguire today!)

I am sitting in an orthodontist’s waiting room in L.A. I guess the same guy that works on my girlfriend’s teeth also caters to the stars because Tobey Maguire just walked in. I’d get a picture, but I’d rather not be rude like a paparazzi and interrupt his day so I’ll just post a pic of him off google images (he didn’t have his kid with him, just his personal assistant, though oddly enough he was holding a bottle just like that). Anyways, onto writing my english assignment right? Maybe I should ask Tobey what he thinks of English as a lingua franca, or I could ask his personal assistant. Maybe not. Thanks to free wifi I have actually had the chance to do some research online and consult the experts.
I found an article titled “ English as a lingua franca” by Barbara Seidlhofer in the online Oxford Journals. The main focus of this article was about defining the term and the academic study of English as a lingua franca, referred to in short as ELF. She defines it as “communication in English between speakers with different first languages.” Now my internet connection is fading away, and Tobey Maguire just left.
Now that I’ve just gotten back home and been able to hop back onto the internet, I stumbled across something very interesting: “Globish!” “Globish is a simple pragmatic form of English codified by Jean-Paul Nerriere, a retired vice-president of IBM in the US. It involves a vocabulary limited to 1500 words, short sentences, basic syntax, an absence of idiomatic expressions and extensive hand gestures to get the point across” (Adam Sage, thaustrialian.com.au/news). It was basically developed so that french business people could communicate at English business meanings easier. It has continued to grow and be taught to people of several other languages as an easier way to adapt to English as a lingua franca.
Thanks to the nature of the internet I decided to keep following more rabbit trails and discovered their are several languages that have been constructed as “international auxiliary languages.” All of them are attempts to make world communication easier. Then I sort of got back on track by researching Charles K. Ogden’s “Basic English.” The website (http://ogden.basic-english.org/) describes it this way: “If one were to take the 25,000 word Oxford Pocket English Dictionary and take away the redundancies of our rich language and eliminate the words that can be made by putting together simpler words, we find that 90% of the concepts in that dictionary can be achieved with 850 words. The shortened list makes simpler the effort to learn spelling and pronunciation irregularities. The rules of usage are identical to full English so that the practitioner communicates in perfectly good, but simple, English.” Basic English was developed in 1930 and used as a tool to teach people in Asia to speak english.
The goal of a lingua franca is obviously an appealing concept to people and has been for a long time. I don’t doubt that people must want to be able to more easily communicate with people worldwide, especially in areas of business, medicine, science and technology. However people probably wish their language was already the lingua franca so they wouldn’t have to put extra effort into breaking the language barrier. That is probably why simplified versions of english such as Globish and Basic English have been developed.