Toward Global Poetry and Fiction: The Healing Role of Standard Worldwide American Pronunciation English

by Robert Oliphant

If our battle against global warming requires global communication and consensus, we should welcome the spread of “standard worldwide American pronunciation English” (call it SWAPE or Ameriphonics for short).  Right now SWAPE has official or official-alternate status in over 120 sovereign nations, along with de facto status in billion-plus nations like India and mainland China.  By 2050, we can certainly expect at least two thirds of our carbon-footprint worriers (probably 7 billion out of 10 billion) to understand — and question — via SWAPE exactly what their planetary leaders are talking about.

For clarity let’s start by drawing a sharp line between USA SWAPE and Global SWAPE.  USA-SWAPE, as most of us know from direct experience, has an extraordinarily large slang vocabulary listed in its dictionaries: humongous, icky, boss “good,” etc. — most of them now out of date.    Global-SWAPE, on the other hand, emphasizes our planet’s multi-national non-dialectal vocabulary, especially its technical terms, thereby ensuring that American and non-American professionals will be able to understand each other and collaborate efficiently

A Global SWAPE dictionary. . . .This non-dialectal emphasis accounts for the Global SWAPE status of the Random House unabridged dictionary, especially its electronic version, which offers quick access to several hundred high tech word lists, e.g., fields like anatomy and pathology).

As might be expected, the Global-SWAPE instructional approach in offshore Ameriphone learning is equally non-dialectal in its treatment of poetry (including memorization) and novels.  By way of illustration:  a little browsing in Canadian book stores will give Americans a fairly reliable non-dialectal picture of SWAPE poetry and novels, as opposed to the overwhelming range of choice in our own American book stores. 

Poetry Out Loud and global learners. . . . Practically considered, the current web site of Poetry Out Loud offers global learners a wide ranging list of over 400 SWAPE poems (including classic British authors) to choose from.  Thanks to Kindle and other innovations in high speed reading, it is also likely that future expansions of The Big Read, another National Endowment for the Arts program, will offer participants an equally broad range of at least 200 internationally distinguished novels, each thriftily testable via position sequence tests and public performance (including DVDs).

As indicated by its measurement-standards design, the success of Poetry Out Loud owes a great deal to the international impact of W. Edwards Deming’s TQM (Total Quality Management).  So we can be confident that SWAPE-based global learning, especially poetry and fiction,  will continue its international growth and impact, enough so that the next 40 years, thanks to a common global literature and language, will see our at-risk planet at a far higher level of common perception (“psychological mobility,” Daniel Bell called it). 

Reasonable expectations. . . . On the darker side, I see no guarantee that higher levels of linguistic and literary commonality will necessarily produce higher levels of what James Buchanan called The Calculus of Consent; cf.  our own Civil War and other mono-ethnic internecine butcheries.  On the brighter side, the current Global SWAPE, along with grass roots programs like Poetry Out Loud, is immensely heartening and encouraging, all the more so for being relatively unnoticed by our upscale politicians and soothsayers (the USA has not had an “official” dictionary since 1961, by the way).  

     On balance then:  With a grace period of forty years during which our global language and literature can grow and pull us together more and more, I feel there’s a good chance that our own grandchildren will look back and respect us for being both wise and lucky in getting this fascinating show on the road.  And are not wisdom and luck what good grandparents earnestly yearn to be praised for in the long run?