The adoption of English as the first or second language in virtually every country of the world is a relatively recent phenomenon and is usually attributed to the spread of PCs.
Whilst most Generation X and Y-ers do not even think about it, the fact is, before they were born, (ie only 20-30 years ago), languages like French were still insisting on their supremacy as the only truly international language.
Other than the opening ceremony at the Olympics I can’t readily think of any other modern event, of international significance, which includes a French ‘connection’, although as the traditional diplomatic language it is still translated at all UN conferences.
When I was at school in New Zealand (no, not a hundred years ago) I was actually taught a made up ‘portmanteau’ language called Esperanto. The theory, presumably, was if you mixed up a bit of English, with some Francais, threw in some Espanol for good measure, plus an assortment of other languages, you would end up with a truly universal language.
Some academic committee, somewhere, must have decided it would be a good idea to create a brand new ‘high brow’ language and one can only speculate that this ill-conceived (yet overtly politically correct) idea evolved from the well-established use of Pidgin languages over many centuries.
According to Wikipedia a ‘pidgin’ is a simplified language that develops as a means of communication between two or more groups that do not have a language in common, in situations such as trade.
Pidgins are not the native language of any speech community, but are instead learned as second languages. Pidgins usually have low prestige with respect to other languages.
Which sounds an awful lot like slang to me; our mates at Wikipedia say an expression should be considered ‘true slang’ if it meets at least two of the following criteria:
• It lowers, if temporarily, "the dignity of formal or serious speech or writing"; in other words, it is likely to be seen in such contexts as a "glaring misuse of register”.
• Its use implies that the user is familiar with whatever is referred to, or with a group of people that are familiar with it and use the term.
• "It is a taboo term in ordinary discourse with people of a higher social status or greater responsibility".
• It replaces "a well known conventional synonym". This is done primarily to avoid "the discomfort caused by the conventional item [or by] further elaboration".
Of course, slang should be distinguished from Jargon, which is the technical vocabulary of a particular profession.
Jargon, like many examples of slang, may on occasion be used to exclude non-group members from the conversation, but in general has the function of allowing its users to talk precisely about technical issues in a given field.
Anyone involved with computers these days knows that there are now three languages to be considered on the internet. Natural language (English – or Bill Gate’s version anyway – don’t you hate all the Zs), Machine language (lines of code using only 0’s and 1’s). And now a third hybrid version of natural language, which is full of keywords – seeded by webmasters anxious to improve their search ranking on Google et al.
This latest version is a bit like Pidgin in that it blends natural English with other words, however its major drawback is that it repeats the same pure English words and can become tiresome to read on web pages, particularly since we have all become accustomed over the years to most good writers (sub-editors) of English deliberately avoiding the use of the same word to improve copy readability.
Unlike educated humans, robots (I include spiders/crawlers/google bots here) think that saying the ‘exact’ same word three times is inherently of more value or relevance than using alternative synonyms.
Simple example here: the keywords ‘cars, cars, cars’ would rank substantially higher on the web than ‘cars, automobiles and motor vehicles’.
Boring, boring, boring I say. And one can only hope the gurus at Mountain View will be able to overcome this particular deficiency in the years to come. | 
