"Africa" and the huge number of African languages is why Caterpillar (of yellow earth diggers and big trucks fame) developed "Caterpillar English", a simple, restricted vocabulary version of English that could be used for documentation where the local language represented too small a chunk of the market to make it economic to make local translations. They worked on the premise that the penetration of English was sufficient that a simplified version was likely to be acceptable where a translation wasn't feasible. (Often Africans that don't share a common tongue speak a 'pigeon' variety of English to each other even though no native English speakers are involved. Substitute 'Pigeon French' for some parts of Africa.)
Safety-critical industries like aviation have long had special simplified language requirements, using restricted (and curated) vocabularies, simplified grammar, etc.
Is Caterpillar’s simplified standard English, or is it actually a pidgin?
"Africa" and the huge number of African languages is why Caterpillar (of yellow earth diggers and big trucks fame) developed "Caterpillar English", a simple, restricted vocabulary version of English that could be used for documentation where the local language represented too small a chunk of the market to make it economic to make local translations. They worked on the premise that the penetration of English was sufficient that a simplified version was likely to be acceptable where a translation wasn't feasible. (Often Africans that don't share a common tongue speak a 'pigeon' variety of English to each other even though no native English speakers are involved. Substitute 'Pigeon French' for some parts of Africa.)
Indeed. I recently stumbled on a BBC website and thought it was a joke - it's all the current BBC news in Pidgin English. It's fucking hilarious, surely some dude translating the regular BBC news into some 419 scammers lingo as a laugh.
But it's actually real and funded by BBC licence payers - check out https://www.bbc.com/pidgin 
That’s amazing.
I had a look and I found it surprisingly readable. I say that because whenever I've encountered transcribed pidgin English before (it's really just a spoken language) I've found it really difficult, at times impossible, to translate back into full blown English. As an English speaker I've found pidgin more 'foreign' than I find French and German. I had a African friend at university try and teach me the basics and it just would not stick, I got nowhere with it.
It’s the linguistic “uncanny valley”: it’s too close to your native language for it to “register” as separate, so it keeps trying to get parsed as standard English even though it’s not.
Disclaimer for the following comments: I’m not Swiss, but an American living in Switzerland, who studied linguistics, native English speaker who grew up trilingual ultimately, whose mother is a language teacher, and who worked for years as a technical writer and translator. So please no dismissive comments about how I have no right to an opinion as a non-native speaker. It is also why the best thing we could do is to get the rest of the world to give up on their native languages and make English a universal language. The trend of the last few decades to teach students in the USA a foreign language has been a huge mistake, a waste of money really. Instead we should have been raising a armies of English teachers to send around the world.
Hmm, it has its merits, but the thing is we tried this when there was a British empire that spanned the globe and still those pesky foreigners still insisted on sticking with their own languages. The French, Dutch and Germans tried it too before us and also failed. Remember too that before we could get started on the rest of the world, that we'd have the massive uphill task first of teaching you Americans to speak English too.
I reeeeeaaaallllllly hope you’re being sarcastic there, because linguistically speaking, British claims of Americans not speaking English are complete and utter nonsense, both from a modern linguistic perspective and a historical perspective. (British English diverged from our common ancestral English
more than American English has. And nearly every characteristic of American English that the British love to criticize is, in fact, found in various dialects of British, Scottish, and Irish English.)
Having studied a couple of languages other than American I find a lot of merit in learning other languages. It aids in understanding of how American English came into being and also provides insight into some different world views. Those world views are only a bit different for European languages, but get much larger for others.
”American” isn’t a language. I think you’re thinking of “English”, particularly, the dialect known as “American English”.
But I do agree it would be useful if everyone spoke a common language. And for all of Cerebus comment (which I am sure is somewhat tongue in cheek) if all spoke as close to a common language as Americans and British do it would serve the usefulness criteria. Even if a speaker of one of the extreme American dialects and one of the extreme British dialects found it totally impossible to communicate. People on this forum do pretty well and come from all parts of the former British empire.
Indeed, the high degree of mutual intelligibility is what proves that American English and British English (as well as Australian, Canadian, etc.) are indeed dialects of the same language, and not distinct languages.
There are 3 reasons why English is so widespread today. 1) The British Empire spread it around the world. 2) The dominance of the USA drives it forward. 3) Its a flexible language that is happy to absorb from others. Point 3 makes it messy, but it also means it avoids being exclusionary. Some European languages have tried to exclude pollution by foreign languages, and its making them fossilize and lose relevance. People are generally accepting of English.
Point three is actually nothing but urban legend. English is perfectly happy to borrow from other languages,
but so is every other language. The fact that some countries have felt the need to enact laws to stop linguistic borrowing is proof that the languages themselves (and their speakers) are just as happy to borrow. (Such laws are political and cultural instruments, not linguistic ones as such.) Throughout history, whatever language happens to be dominant in a given domain tends to become a donor to other languages. So when Ancient Greece was the powerhouse, Greek words spread. When French was the world language, French words got borrowed a lot (especially in international politics and law). When Germany was the epicenter of development in psychology and mathematics, languages around the world borrowed German words in those fields. Right now, especially in computing and tech, the US was the leader in those fields, and coined the terms, so they’ve spread into other languages.
And in the future, when some seminal development happens somewhere else, that place’s language will mint the world’s language of that field.
What’s made English spelling messy is that a) unlike most major world languages, English has both its “native” Germanic vocabulary and its Norman French vocabulary, which came with their own spelling traditions, and more importantly b) like many languages, English has had numerous pronunciation shifts, but
due to the lack of a centralized language authority, has never gone and updated the spelling of a word. So in English,
the spelling of a given word reflects how the word would have been spoken at the time when it was first written down. And then depending on how long ago a word was coined, it has gone through more or fewer pronunciation shifts. (Ultimately, this means English has something like 7 or 8 major “sets” of spelling systems. It’s not random, as people often claim.)
Many other languages have an official language authority that decides and then makes official, binding decrees about how the language shall be used. (It gets extra fun when multiple countries use the same language and then fight over authority, like Portuguese, whose last major language reform adopted tons of Brazilian spellings, much to the consternation of speakers of European Portuguese!) English, in contrast, has two major, but completely unofficial, arbiters: Oxford and Webster’s. (Of those, Oxford is, by far, the more important of the two, and to the likely surprise of many a Brit, it does not take a strong dislike to American English. IMHO, Oxford’s linguists of English are actually very, very fair and take a nuanced, objective approach to English, not the nationalistic, hysterical positions taken by laymen.)
They would probably get an Australian to translate!
My brother used to relate incidents from when he was in the Occupation Forces in Japan in the late 1940s, where some Brits & Americans couldn't understand each other & called upon him to translate.
Even funnier, some Americans couldn't understand each other, & he needed to do the same thing for them.
Cute story, but almost certainly untrue. What’s much more likely is that they didn’t understand each other in terms of the content, not the language, and just needed someone to explain something a different way.
Of course, that was many years ago, & differences in dialects have been very much reduced since then.
Interestingly, this belief is very widespread, but actually
completely untrue. It is often claimed that mass media (whose production has been focused in a few places, historically) and travel would lead to a leveling of English dialects, but linguists who have studied this have found that in fact, the polar opposite is happening: the dialects are getting
stronger.
It’s long been known in linguistics that socioeconomic identity plays a part in the expression of dialect usage, and so the working theory is that the frequent exposure to the prominent dialects in the media (e.g. New York and Los Angeles dialects) actually causes people who don’t identify with the “prestige” culture to use their regionalisms more. There was a famous (well, in linguistics) study about the local dialect on the island of Martha’s Vineyard. Researchers looked at what percentage of residents used the island dialect vs the mainstream (mainland) dialect. When plotted by age, at age 18 there’s a big jump in island dialect. Why? Because the kids who didn’t identify with the island culturally left the island as soon as they could, when they turned 18! So the people who remained on the island were those who have a stronger island identity, and thus use the dialect.
What I feel (but haven’t looked into in any way) is that the Internet has led to a bit more exchange of vocabulary in English. But only choice of words, not pronunciation or grammar.
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