December 2001 - Nr. 12
Down with "Denglish"
TWIG - "When I first came to Germany, I could only speak English. But now the German language has so many English words, I speak fluent German!" With a wink of irony, comedian Rudi Carrell speaks for a growing group of Germans. "Had it up to here with ‘beauty fluids’ and ‘pay TV’?" asks an ad run recently in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. The ad, which was sponsored by the Foundation for the German Language (VDS), is directed at German speakers who feel alienated by the "galloping anglicization" of their language. "Beauty fluids" and "pay TV" are but two of the hundreds of (mostly U.S.) linguistic exports. "Outsourcing," "fun," and "slow mo" are words that a younger generation of Germans, brought up on globalized media, entertainment and travel, now count as their own. But to some older Germans and those who feel the German language is in danger of losing its cultural significance, those same words are alienating, or at least confusing. Denglish — the name some have given to a language cobbled together from Deutsch and English — has opponents eager to speak up.
Chief among them is the VDS, founded in 1997 by Walter Kraemer, an economics professor from Dortmund. Today the association boasts 13,000 members in 30 countries. The VDS advocates greater care and preservation of the German language. As the association’s mission statement makes clear, the group "does not want a ‘pure’ German language. [It] only wants to hold back the flood of unnecessary English words." Words that have gained international acceptance, such as "laser," "jeans," and "Internet" are fine with the VDS, too. What the group objects to is the displacement of perfectly adequate German words by their often shorter, hipper English equivalents. "News," "bike" and "shop," for instance, all have well-established German counterparts. Further, the reflexive adoption of English words for new products or services dissuades Germans from thinking creatively about these innovations and reflecting on what they mean in German life.
The roots of some German words date back centuries, making each a tiny "cultural monument." If more Germans were aware of this, the VDS argues, they might take greater care to preserve and promote them. German nouns, famously polysyllabic, often have shorter English equivalents — "pesticide" for Unkrautvernichtungsmittel, for instance — making the English an attractive linguistic short cut. But the VDS contends that what these words gain in pith, they lose in accuracy or clarity. The strength of German is its concreteness, the result of many logically constructed compound nouns. Moreover, English words ripped from context and plugged willy-nilly into German — Handy for cell phone, for example — take on new, often distorted meanings. Then, the VDS worries, the words of venerated German rhetoric professor Walter Jens, that soon "the Germans will be able to speak neither German nor English," may come true.
