I gave this piece of EIL/ ELF advice for the first time last week, and it was particular painful as it was about something I had championed a lot in the past.

I’ve always had problems with the now universal phrase “Nice to meet you”, which to me sounds about as natural as the “Howareyou? I’mfinethankyouandyou” dialogues that all kids have in their textbooks. I’ve therefore long been on a quixotic quest to get the whole world saying “Pleased to meet you” (or “How are you?” “How are you.” in more informal situations) instead.

Seems I was not alone on this, as half of a recent class already knew “Pleased to meet you” and tried it out on their classmates. Unfortunately, the other students gave the same reaction as I have seen in many multinational meetings, which was blank incomprehension. Doesn’t help that it sounds like “Please to meet you” (meaning “I want to meet you”, even though I already have??) and that it isn’t just enough to understand from context because “Pleased to meet you” “Nice to meet you too” wouldn’t quite sound right.

Much as it pained me, I gave everyone the advice to be ready to reply “Pleased to meet you too” should they meet another middle aged Brit, but under no circumstances to try using it first in multilingual groups of people, and so just stick to the textbook favourite “Nice to meet you” (shudder) instead.

If I’ve said it once I’ve said it a million times – the English as an International Language/ English as a Lingua Franca that we will be teaching is already here and it is called “textbook English”. So, get ready to burn twenty years of corpus based materials…