Amongst the Singaporean geriatric population, the majority (80%) have below secondary educational qualifications, and many spoke only their mother tongue (Chinese dialects, Malay, or Tamil) which the treating physician may not be fluent at, instead of the official language, English.
And it happens that architectural languages are proliferating even as spoken tongues and dialects are withering away.
Language, after all, is in a constant state of evolution: Words and usage change, specific tongues and dialects go extinct.
McCrum is bullish on Globish: the reign of English as the world's lingua franca or default tongue, "the worldwide dialect of the third millennium," the language in which China trades with Zambia, the language in which a Greek watching CNN phones a friend from the Middle East to get him off the London bus he's riding before it explodes.
Many people are bilingual or multilingual, knowing their local vernacular dialect ("mother tongue"), its associated written variant, and, perhaps, one or more other languages.
Arabs speak regional dialects as their mother tongue, and the differences between dialects can be significant enough to cause mutual unintelligibility.
And if we can learn to incorporate this new "tongue" into our diplomatic dialects, perhaps it will illuminate possibilities previously unknown.
Boys steer clear of her, because she is "skinny, dirty, and always had a cut or bruise of some sort, but also because she had a sharp tongue... spoke a scathing dialect, full of swear words, which cut off at its origin any feeling of love".
"My secondary tongue is standard English, a dialect of the seat of power, London".
Combining academic research with interviews on their travels, they tell the story of how a modest northern Iberian dialect became mother tongue to over 400m people.They have collected some interesting linguistic titbits.
