Standard English: OUT – El Silbo IN

sanchopansa — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 20:07:13 +0000

Can El Silbo, the whistling language of the Canaries, become a serious contender to Basic Global English or even Standard English?

Beware: Satire

Are you fed up with hearing grunting noises, expletives, ever more babble and prattle, bellowing and yelling? Are you sick and tired of listening to Local Englishes, the maimed and substandard forms of Standard English? Have you had enough of conversing in Basic Global English, which is Dr. Joachim Grzega`s mutilated and novel form of Local English? Then, El Silbo, the harmonious whistling language of Gomera with its warbling and trilling, tweeting and cheeping sounds may appeal to you.

The whistling language El Silbo enables people to communicate across the many deep valleys of the volcanic island of Gomera. This set me thinking and I have been wondering why could it not be used to bridge the gap between Standard English and its new expanded Pidgin English varieties. In my humble opinion, it is well suited to become the lowest common denominator like Globish or Basic Global English. El Silbo seems somewhat superior to some of the newer forms of Neo Pidgin English or Local Englishes in the making.

El Silbo has no syntax or grammar of its own. It is a sign language, like Morse code or some rudimentary form of Neo-Pidgin English. The language has four vowels and four consonants which can be whistled in rising or falling pitches to form some 4,000 words. Although some say this restricts conversation, expert whistlers maintain that if you can say it, you can whistle it. Messages must be whistled with rhythm, clarity and power, which makes El Silbo far superior to Dr. Grzega`s novel and daring Basic Global English, which distinguishes itself by its paucity of diction with its basic vocabulary of 750 words and a bonus vocabulary of 250 to describe the speakers` individual worlds with.

While you can see locals in the sunny island of Gomera, gazing out to sea and puckering up to perform their “Silbo” whistling language, I have already reconciled myself to facing the next wave of language deterioration, which is sure to happen with the unrelenting advance of substandard language in the media, the internet and books.

About this posting

This posting is part of a series dedicated to topics dealing with various aspects of the English language which usually get short shrift on the internet and in other publications. It is, in a wider sense, concerned with the English language crumbling into incomprehensibility at alarming speed and how society is influenced by it. How do schools and universities react and in what way is literature affected by all this? Furthermore, how do people working in education and linguistics cope with this avalanche of “Local English neologisms”?

What often sounds like modern Pidgin English can generally be put down to neo-pidginicity. It is an artificially accelerated and manipulated process – or rather linguistic genetic engineering – of attempting to oversimplify Standard English, the result of which is in all cases some sort of neo-pidgin English or Simplified-Simple-Speak. Four major fields of contact contribute to the gradual encroachment on Standard English: Basic Global English, as advocated by Dr. Joachim Grzega, machine translations of any kind, unedited documents and publications – frequently of international validity – being passed off as standard English but in fact written by non-native speakers of English, the acceptance of “Local English” and non-native speakers of English teaching their version of “Local English”. The result of the English “produced” in all these areas of contact is often, at best, a barely elevated Pidgin English.

And to compound matters, Globish appears to become a composite haphazard mixture of all about 180 Local Englishes and may for that very reason not be as easy as some people think once it has evolved into a sub-language of Standard English.

Finally, it would be interesting to see the first book written in Basic Global English, Dr. Joachim Grzega`s novel and daring invention and see in which section bookshops will display such a work of art.

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Standard English: OUT – El Silbo IN