The New English
I have a promise with my teacher. (I should meet my friend).
I live in apartu. (I live in an apartment building.)
The movie was so-so. (The movie was boring.)
These are just a few examples of Konglish, another dialect of English, like Chinglish and Singlish, Michael Erard lampoons and warns about.
Any language is constantly evolving, so it's not surprising that English, transplanted to new soil, is bearing unusual fruit. Nor is it unique that a language, spread so far from its homelands, would begin to fracture. The obvious comparison is to Latin, which broke into mutually distinct languages over hundreds of years — French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian. A less familiar example is Arabic: The speakers of its myriad dialects are connected through the written language of the Koran and, more recently, through the homogenized Arabic of Al Jazeera. But what's happening to English may be its own thing: It's mingling with so many more local languages than Latin ever did, that it's on a path toward a global tongue — what's coming to be known as Panglish. Soon, when Americans travel abroad, one of the languages they'll have to learn may be their own.
Yet, when South Koreans come to do business, will native speakers tolerate this creativity? And, how much time and money will be wasted because two interlocutors believe that they are speaking in the same language, when suddenly they realize each person's speech is indecipherable to the other?
Really, it's just laziness condoned.
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