Giorgio Pagano, Secretary of the "Esperanto" Radical Association, answers to Franceschini’s Repubblica article
In a lengthly article published in today’s paper, La Repubblica, Enrico Franceschini reprised Robert McCrum’s "Glob-ish" for his article “Globish, la lingua low cost che tutti possiamo imparare” (“Globish, the low-cost language that we can all learn”), a term that surfaced in Newsweek on June 12th.
Franceschini claims now that English no longer has an owner, it has obviously become THE global language, it is spoken by 4 Billion people, and it is the language that "the conquered, the seduced, the vanquished, have all digested, learned and remoulded according to each one’s needs."
All of which is false! Globish does not exist as its own language. Not to mention, we’re talking about a poor English, filled with errors, and sometimes simply not comprehendable.
Indeed, students from all over the world go to English-speaking countries, not to China, to learn English. Students don’t watch American movies to accustom themselves with the English language, and in every school they use Oxford and Harvard Grammar books, not Tallin’s, to learn "real" English. There is nothing low-cost about it, it is all at a high price!
The truth is that the 400 million English-speaking mothertongues carrying the English hegemony have incredible political and economic advantages, whilst everyone else spends millions of euros a year to access the dominant language. To call English "Glo-bish" is another clever English strategy to ensure that the non-English-speaking fools swallow the pill that we call linguistic colonization.