Are Indians and Singaporeans native speakers of the English language? That's what Janadas Devan wrote in the Sunday Times in Singapore. He wrote:

Any language as spoken by its native speakers — which, in the case of English, include not only the British and the Americans, but also Indians, Nigerians and Singaporeans — has a density of meaning, an intricacy of nuance, an irreducible idiomatic singularity that is not obvious to its non-native speakers.

He began the article with a compliment from of one of his newspaper colleagues, who said: "Janadas' English is so good, he can't understand my simple English." 

Anyone so conscious of his command of the language — "I write and speak a literary English," he added —  has to be a careful writer.

So he must have meant what he wrote about Singaporeans and Indians being native English speakers.

I am surprised. Only the Eurasians and Anglo-Indians among us, I thought, could claim English as their mother tongue.

My view is shared by Robert McCrum, who in his new book, Globish — reviewed by Janadas Devan in his column — explores the spread of English as a global language.

He does not regard Indians and Singaporeans as native English speakers but writes appreciatively of Indian English and Singaporean English, or Singlish, in his study of Globish — the English of non-native speakers.

The full title of his book is Globish: How English Became the World's Language.

But this isn't a history of the English language like Henry Hitchings' The Secret Life of Words and Jack Lynch's The Lexicographer's Dilemma.

Nor does it explore the the differences between, say, Caribbean Creole and the Irish Brogue like The Story of English, co-authored by McCrum with Robert MacNeil and William Cran in the 1980s.

What McCrum does in his new book is look at the driving forces behind the spread of English — the British empire, the rise of America as a superpower, and globalization.

Countries like China, Iran and Greenland, which have never been under British rule or American influence, are also taking to English, he writes.

He devotes more than two pages to English in Singapore, which is worth quoting at length.

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