By JON PARELES

English will be a second language at the Public Theater on Saturday night, when Globalfest takes over all three of its stages to present 16 world music groups. Performers from Cuba, Brazil, Iran, Benin, France, Lebanon, Peru and elsewhere will be playing compressed but crucial 40-minute sets for an audience full of impresarios as well as the public.

Its promoters hope Globalfest is the beginning of a nationwide touring circuit for world music groups. Members of the Association of Performing Arts Presenters - who book concert halls, college auditoriums, festivals, clubs and nonprofit spaces small and large - are meeting in New York, and Globalfest wants to introduce many of them to the accessible beauties of world music.

A full-scale American touring circuit would give world music performers a chance to be heard beyond audiences of big-city cognoscenti and homesick expatriates. And touring makes fans.

World music is almost always more vivid and convincing in concert than on recordings. Too often musicians who are used to live audiences feel awkward in recording studios, or producers persuade them that they need to dilute their music, or no-budget engineering makes a vibrant band sound monochromatic. Onstage people can see how the musicians interact and perhaps pick up a dance step. It is world music's best hope of connecting with a wider audience.

But it's not as if a band from Madagascar or Romania can just pile into a van and hit the road. There's little incentive to cross an ocean for a handful of shows.

"It's really hard for international artists to have financially viable tours of North America," said Bill Bragin, the director of Joe's Pub at the Public Theater and one of three promoters behind Globalfest. The other two are Isabel Soffer of the World Music Institute in New York and Maure Aronson of World Music Inc. in Boston. "A lot of them play two or three cities, and a 10-city tour is a really good tour. But the economics of doing that are prohibitive. It would be great if an artist could do a 30- or 40-city tour, hitting secondary and tertiary markets and university towns, too."

World music bands also face a Catch-22. The small labels that release most world music are reluctant to put out albums here unless a band can tour the United States. Yet it's difficult to get bookings without an album. "Labels are saying, `You need to have a way of getting into the country and touring on an ongoing basis for this to be worth our investment,' " said Dmitri Vietze, whose publicity and marketing firm, Rock Paper Scissors, represents many world music performers and labels.

Globalfest intends to show promoters what they may have been missing. It's designed like a smaller American cousin of Womex, the annual European world music showcase. It mixes performers who have made a name with American world music audiences, like the singer Angélique Kidjo from Benin and the Portuguese fado singer Mariza, and performers who are lesser known here, like Marcel Khalife, a Lebanese oud player and composer, or the Greek singer Savina Yannatou. For promoters not eager to deal with immigration applications, it also includes some United States residents, like the Brazilian percussionist Cyro Baptista and his New York-based band, Beat the Donkey, and the Haitian singer Emeline Michel, who has a home in New York City.

"World music" has always been a vague and arguable term. It gets applied indiscriminately to ancient traditions, foreign-language pop confections, non-European classical music and mild exotica with a routine electronic beat. But its openness has been useful. It provides a category for record stores, physical or online, to classify a confusing assortment of music, and it leads people who like one kind of "world music" to consider others offered nearby.

Despite language barriers and lack of mass exposure, world music has built an American audience in conspicuous and quiet ways, although such a loose category makes statistics hard to come by. When the Recording Industry Association of America surveys consumers about what kind of music they buy, world music is submerged in the 8 percent of the market categorized as "other," along with spoken-word, big-band, electronic and comedy albums. "Other" doesn't include reggae, which often dominates Billboard magazine's world music chart. Amazon's "international" top sellers include the soundtrack to "The Fellowship of the Ring," Andrea Bocelli and Abba's greatest hits.

Album sales of world music are comparable to jazz or indie rock. "Buena Vista Social Club" sold a million copies in the United States and more abroad, while albums of West African griot songs or Tuvan throat singing may do well to sell just a few thousand copies. Putumayo World Music, which aims to reach novice listeners, has racked up sales of 300,000 on its collections "Cuba" and "Music From the Coffee Lands."

Some stars - like Youssou N'Dour from Senegal, Cesaria Evora from Cape Verde, the Chieftains from Ireland, Ladysmith Black Mambazo from South Africa and Ravi Shankar from India - can now make annual American tours of concert halls. English-speaking rockers have collaborated with, and brought attention to, musicians like the Algerian rai singer Cheb Mami, who joined Sting at the 2001 Super Bowl.

Hip-hop's insatiable appetite for startling samples has slipped world music into the pop mainstream, lately with Jay-Z's collaboration with the Indian rapper Panjabi MC. Jazz and new age music have long since embraced the international, and recent dancehall reggae is infatuated with the modes of India and the Middle East. People visiting dance floors, chill-out lounges or yoga classes also regularly hear non-Western sounds.

A few listeners go on to track down the sources of a particularly intriguing sound; others simply enjoy it. Obviously there's far less xenophobia among listeners than there is among commercial radio programmers. But without the prospect of mass-media exposure any time soon, world music needs to build momentum in other ways.

If commercial radio is a barrier, the road need not be. For the last few years an informal association of world music promoters, labels, agents, managers, musicians, public-radio broadcasters, publicists and retailers has been coalescing under the name of the North American World Music Coalition, trading ideas and connections and figuring out how to make the most of modest resources.

The model can be what jam bands have done: hitting the road to bypass commercial media and win fans onstage, while creating a word-of-mouth network that extends to the Internet. There are already informative Web sites like www.afropop.org and www.worldmusiccentral.org. Mr. Vietze envisions a world music equivalent of a site like www.jambase.com, a nationwide calendar and directory of bands and shows.

First, promoters need to help listeners share their discoveries. If world-music performers can find stepping stones across the United States - the club gigs or college shows between big-city concerts and festivals - there's every reason to think that they'll find new, delighted listeners along the way. With any luck Globalfest will be the start not of something big, but of something lasting.