The Shanghai government has announced plans to appoint a task force to cleanse the city's public signs of "Chinglish." This effort is seen as a necessary step forward in cosmopolitan sophistication, given the ever-increasing surge of overseas visitors, with the run-up to the 2010 World Expo adding a further sense of urgency.

It is true that many public signs are marred by examples of bad English. This is especially unfortunate when the appreciation of an otherwise impressive monument or museum exhibit is given a ludicrous twist by a simple grammatical error or spelling mistake.

It would be sad, however, if this latest initiative was taken as yet another opportunity to denigrate the uniquely Chinese contribution to the English language, associating it merely with errors, confusion and unintentional absurdities.

During the early stages of widespread English acquisition it is natural that emphasis should be placed on "correct usage." But to set this attitude in stone is to misunderstand the nature of linguistic evolution, and of English in particular.

The ascent of English as a global language is related to such commonly-noted external factors as the prominence of US power and influence in the world. Yet internal factors also play a role.

The most important of these is the hybrid nature of English, its extraordinary "impurity." English has mixed innumerable languages into itself, grafting a predominantly romance vocabulary onto a predominantly Germanic grammar, with a wide-range of Greek and Latin constructions providing a highly versatile tool-kit for its expansion.

Over the centuries its grammar has become progressively simplified and increasingly open to dialectal modification, so that grammatical "correctness" is often variable or uncertain. It is no coincidence that Shakespeare is not only the most universally acclaimed English author, but also the greatest grammatical and neologistic "barbarian", regularly invoked in support of atypical or even blatantly aberrant formulations. Such crowning of "transgressive genius" within the English literary canon is a continuing theme.

Like every other language, English is - and has always been - a work in progress, yet one clear advantage English undoubtedly possesses is its self-conscious celebration of this fact. Where a thicket of French laws and institutions offer futile resistance to the waves of linguistic change, the English approach is strictly laissez faire. As in most other things, freedom works best.

The key to all this is participation. Every population that has ever involved itself in the English language has changed, variegated and enriched it. China's current commitment to popular English competence is historically unprecedented in its rapidity and scale. The resulting transformation of English will be immense.

It is time to stop thinking of Chinglish as a linguistic disease. Far more realistic is to accept it as the rising tide within English. Chinglish has its own, yet unformed, innovative trends which should be distinguished from mere errors or carelessness. After all, is it really possible to think hundreds of millions of Chinese speakers could simply "learn" English without changing it? That definitely would be a mistake.