'Panglish' to replace English as global language

London, Mar 29: The coming years will see billions of people across the world speak a new tongue called 'Panglish', which will replace English as the global language, experts say. English as we know it is evolving into a new, simplified form and amazingly, the changes are not being driven by Britons, Americans or Australians.

Rather, Panglish will be similar to the versions of English used by non-native speakers who speak English as a second language. According to linguists, by 2010 about two billion people, a third of the world's population will speak English as a second language in contrast to just 350 million people who will speak it as their first language. By 2020, the number of native speakers of English will decline even more and other languages like Spanish, Hindi, Urdu, Arabic will have the same number of native speakes as that of English, according to a report in the Daily Mail. Experts believe as English gains more popularity, it will increasingly fragment into regional dialects.

''There have always been mutually unintelligible dialects of languages such as Arabic, Chinese, Hindi and Latin. There is no reason to believe that the linguistic future of English will be any different,'' Mr Braj Kachru, one of the world's leading experts in English as a second language said. For instance, Singaporean English combines English with Malay, Tamil and Chinese and is difficult for English-speaking Westerners to understand.

Panglish will lose some of the English sounds which non-native speakers find difficult to pronounce. Consonants will also vanish from the end of words and group nouns which don't have plural versions could vanish, experts said.

Whatsoever, the bottomline is that as new dialects develop, global English or Panglish will become simpler.

UNI