# [[My Globish Identity is Bold and Shallow]] *June 24, 2025* ##### The global dialect comes at a price. Two scenes: > *I'm at a New Year's Eve party in the backcountry of Sydney. Leaning on the hood of a 4x4, I see glittered faces sparkling in the low sun. Crickets are chirping. A tattooed guy with curls approaches me, offering to pour wine from a bladder right into my mouth. Instead of giving in to my irritation towards this Aussie party habit I respond "Bring it on, bloody bogan!" and take a good shot from the bladder.* > *I am in a meeting room with German Engineers and a sales guy from New York City. As always, the American is radiating euphoria when providing feedback to our presentation: "That shit is AWESOME. Let's make this fly!" The confidence stays floating in the room when NY guy leaves to catch a plane. It is when we remember switching back to German that doubts start to rise. „Will this actually work? Won't it be too expensive?“* Speaking English makes me a different person. Beyond non translatable words and specific figures of speech there is something that’s changing when I switch between German, my native language, and English, the daily driver of my work life. Being bold and extroverted in English is easy. Being skeptical and careful in German is easy too. Some years ago I decided I need to do most of my writing and thinking in English. I wanted to: communicate on a global scale, be able to address the cutting edge of my field, speak the global dialect of this age. I chose to increase my reach, expecting my English skills will catch up the more I go down this path. Some of my peers took different routes. They are running great Design Criticism blogs in German. They self-publish carefully crafted german literature in small volumes. A friend of mine only reads books in German, because he neither trusts his English, nor translators. Most of my friends committed to their native language do not live in a metropolitan area, most of them have fewer international friends than I do. Authenticity I care about derives from making decisions aligned with my values, not from some mystic mother tongue identity. In that sense, speaking a lot of English in my adult life is as much of an authentic stance as sticking to my native language. But there is some loss on the way that needs to be recognized. Abandoning my native language for a global dialect is optimizing reach by sacrificing some depth. While others may struggle with finding people to connect to in their native language, speakers of Globish English[^1] have to fight a constant uphill battle against shallow thinking. When I was a kid, I read countless books in German and I still remember the fascination when encountering subtle irritations in the ways something was put into words. Before I learned other languages, I was already able to tell when a book had been translated into German. It was the tiny nuances in sentence structure, the way certain words were used or avoided. I think reading a lot in my native language as a kid fine-tuned my observation, a capacity I benefited from ever since. Another scene: > *Once again, I am in a meeting with German Engineers. There is one english speaker in the room, so the meeting is running in English. Tensions are high, as we are facing a bug of the nasty kind: hard to reproduce, involving software and hardware, a potential blocker for the product release. Fancy words are flying low: "double down on the rootcause", "trigger management escalation", "do a triage", "roll out the hotfix". In a moment of silence, a senior developer speaks up: "Lets cut the bullshit and switch to German. Nobody here has a clue about this issue and it won't get better with us talking in English." For a moment I lost track of running the meeting, observing a trapped fly on the window. Around me, the meeting's vibe shifted from talking about the issue towards dealing with it.* I am usually fine with the dominant role English has taken in my everyday life. But sometimes, there are moments of irritation that make me stop and realize I am part of the bullshit machine when speaking English. Then it is time to jump off and switch back to German, knowing I'll climb right back on tomorrow. [^1]: The term Globish was coined [by Jean-Paul Nerrière](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globish_(Nerri%C3%A8re)) in the 2000s, referring to a simplified version of Business English used by non-native speakers primarily. Today, only 4% of worldwide English conversations involve exclusively exclusively native-speakers (says [a TED-Talk](https://youtu.be/Ge7c7otG2mk?si=13trtLq0wUWOrLzA)).