After years of abuse to the German language, Germans are rising up to protect their language. With 10 million immigrants and 1.7 million Turks in particular having difficulty incorporating the German language into their lives, Germany is set to make German the official language. The Independent reports:
Defending the move, which has been criticised by immigrant groups, left-wing Social Democrats and Greens, Annette Heubiger, one of the Christian Democrat MPs behind the proposal, insisted: “I think it is absolutely normal that the German language is written in to the constitution. After all, it forms our cultural identity and the basis of our mental existence.” Interestingly, her leader, Ms Merkel, was among the few Christian Democrats to vote against the idea. German has been an unpopular language for more than a century: Tina Fey may have admitted recently to Vanity Fair that she has her characters speak a sort of pidgin German in her comedy shows because German is “so uncool” but back in 1880 Mark Twain returned from a visit to Imperial Germany and wrote an essay called, bluntly, The Awful German Language.
However, the main intent is not incorporate German into the lives of immigrants as to combat the main threat to the German language – Denglish.
As is happening throughout the world, English is corrupting native tongues. German is no different.
But the move is also an attempt to guard against what many see as an insidious and virtually unstoppable corruption of German by “Denglish”, the increasingly widespread incorporation of English words and phrases. Denglish has infuriated the German academic world. The writer, Matthias Schreiber, recently described the phenomenon in Der Spiegel magazine as, “A poisonous porridge of magma which is burying a whole cultural landscape beneath it”.
It is not difficult to understand what he is on about. Denglish has created Handy, the ubiquitous German word for cellphone. It has turned the word for television compère into Talkmaster and transmuted “spaced out” into abgespaced, “download” into downloaden, ” baby-sitting” into babysitten and “brainstorming” into brainstormen”. The present marketing phrase designed to attract tourists to the German capital is the bafflingly idiotic, “Be Berlin”.
It gets worse: to clamp down on teenage drinking, the authorities in Bavaria invented the slogan, “Be Hard, Drink Soft!” During the 2006 World Cup football tournament hosted by Germany, the Federal Transport Ministry plastered the country’s motorways with the slogan “FAIRPLAY on the Autobahn”. To appreciate the slogans fully, they should be spoken in a heavy German accent.
The German concern is not just an emotional cultural reaction. The facts reveal German is in fast retreat to the English language. A Hanover University study found that 23 of the 100 most common words used in Germany were English. In 1980, it was only 1 word in 100. At that rate, Germans will be speaking more English than German by 2040.
German language professor Walter Kramer has a simple explanation for the demise of the German language. It is the lingering shame of Nazism. “When Germans think about themselves, they often feel insecure. English offers them security. To put it crudely, they would rather be thought of as half-Americans than complete Nazis.”
