To be born an Englishman,” Cecil Rhodes supposedly said, “is to win first prize in the lottery of life.” But the old imperialist was wrong. What he should have said was, “To be born an English- speaker...” The global rise of bad English is helping us native speakers rise.
I first realised our advantage at a conference last year. The speakers came from across northern Europe, but they all gave their talks in English - or a sort of English. Germans, Belgians and French people would stand up and, in monotones and distracting accents, read out speeches that sounded as if they'd been turned into English by computers. Sometimes the organisers begged them to speak their own languages, but they refused. Meanwhile the conference interpreters sat idle in their booths.
Each new speaker lost the audience within a minute. Yet whenever a native English-speaker opened his mouth, the audience listened. The native speakers sounded conversational, and could make jokes, add nuance. They weren't more intelligent than the foreigners, but they sounded it, and so they were heard. Here, in microcosm, was a nascent international hierarchy: native English- speakers rule.