A Small Island in the North Atlantic, pillaged for hundreds of years by marauding neighbors, becomes a dominant world power whose spreading influence carries its language and literature everywhere on earth. Then, across the Atlantic, a colony of that island becomes the military and cultural colossus of the twentieth century. What happens next is unprecedented. While the global dominance of Anglo-American power seems to be on the wane, the English language acquires a new life of its own. Decoupled from its British and North American Past, it is now able to zoom across time and space, a global phenomenon as never before, to become a supercharged lingua franca. In the twenty-first century, writes Robert McCrum "English plus Microsoft = Globish." Globish charts the spread of global English from "crazy English" in China to the the call centers of Bangalore, and from the King James Bible to President Obama's speeches. It is a brilliant and provocative snapshot of a world in the midst of extraordinary, and unfinished, change.

Book jacket.