The world’s most popular YouTuber is probably PewDiePie. Ostensibly, his videos offer his thoughts on video games, but they also provide a philosophy of life in perfect vernacular youth English: “Don’t be a salad. Be the best goddamn broccoli you could ever be.” His 59.3 million subscribers (or “Bros”, as he calls them) have mostly stayed loyal even after Disney dropped him last year for posting anti-Semitic videos. He said he’d only been joking.
PewDiePie lives in Brighton but — as the faint accent in his videos reveals — he is a Swede called Felix Kjellberg. Born in 1989, he represents the first global generation in which tens of millions of people from outside the English-speaking world speak perfect English. That shift is ominous for the US and UK. Thanks to English, these countries have dominated the global conversation. Their entertainment, media, university and tech sectors bestraddle the world. But now the PewDiePie generation, machine translation, Brexit and Trump are combining to threaten their dominance.
A few non-native speakers have always managed to sneak into the global English conversation. In music, for instance, think of PewDiePie’s fellow Nordics Abba and Björk. But most ambitious foreigners were held back because they spoke not English, but Globish: a simple, dull, idiom-free, cripplingly accented version of English with a small vocabulary. So they rarely sounded as fun, clever or cool in English as native speakers.