I'm going to quote myself here:
mokibao wrote:Native speaker content will always be the norm that L2 learners grow towards. The internet makes that content easily accessible almost everywhere.
Except that 1) there are more non-native speakers of English than native speakers (almost 3x as many), so as the language spreads any piece of English writing or speech is statistically more likely to come from a non-native speaker, and 2) the trend has already begun, with the rise of so-called 'airport English', globish, international English, call that however you like. There are many reports of native English speakers having to adjust their speech patterns and lexicon when they have to deal with international speakers in any prolonged capacity (e.g. research, business and so on). It is still English, but it noticeably deviates from what native speakers are used to: fewer idiotisms, more regularity, more articulation. Then there are local examples in multicultural countries like India or Singapore, where many people use English as a national and second language but their variety is strongly influenced by their respective mother tongue.
What I mean to say, is that just like Latin survived the fall of the Romain Empire and was used as a lingua franca up to 10 centuries onwards, yet an ancient Roman speaking classical Latin would have had a lot of trouble deciphering a Middle Ages text written in ecclesiastical Latin, we are likely to observe the same trend with respect to English and the globalized world, where its international version will diverge, as all languages do, from the varieties locally spoken by native speakers, and we are already seeing the first hints.
But International English isn't a dumbed down version of English. It's not any less 'real' than the English used by native speakers. People using it are no less adept at communicating, naming things and describing their environments using it, than if they were using Hollywood English (which is itself artificial and doesn't represent the diversity among native English speakers), or British English or Australian English. People conclude business deals, write scientific papers and negociate treaties in International English, so obviously their communication can't be dumbed down that much.
Also, words like
holistic don't stump people, because fancy words tend to be cognates. (
Holistic, as it turns out, is
olistico in Italian,
holístico in Spanish... you get the idea.) The real difficulty lies in very idiomatic expressions (such as
you hit it out of the park indeed), slang patterns, regionalisms, and above all locutions whose meaning is completely different from that of its constituent words:
see off,
draw back,
make out, and so on. Non-native speakers aren't adept at using them and will avoid them in favor of equivalent words that don't follow this confusing pattern.
Another difference is that English spoken by native speakers is much less articulated. It takes years of immersion and practice to know which sequence of letters is appropriate to jumble and which one is not. Non-native speakers, especially those who mastered the language academically, and even if they read a ton of complex papers and can write entire treatises, lack spoken practice, so they articulate everything just in case. Which may be just as well since their conversation partners are often also non-native speakers and any attempt to "sound" native would probably result in more confusion, not less.
The words and phrases in vehicular English aren't exactly simple
per se, they draw more often from the common ground found among the greater population, rather than just the Anglo world. This results in shifts of vocabulary and syntax, but is it simpler? I don't think so. Otherwise native English speakers wouldn't also need to adapt to this kind of English.