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The Americanization of the German Language Elisabeth Volquardts from Germany Photo: Elisabeth Volquardts "The German language is very much influenced by English these days. You can call it the Americanization of our language. It's not a phenomenon only in Germany."   The German language is very much influenced by English these days. You can call it the Americanization of our language. It's not a phenomenon only in Germany. Many countries are trying to protect their cultures from the effects of Hollywood, the Internet and the English language. People in Germany have different opinions about this phenomenon. Some of them think it's only a matter of time until this phenomenon is going to end, or they think that every language is constantly changing and Americanization is a part of it right now. That's why many of those people don't care at all. But there are some other people who are trying to protect the German language from the invasion of English words. They are very concerned that the German language is going to be replaced by some kind of mixed language. A friend of mine even told me recently, that he thinks that German will be totally replaced in the far future because of the invasion of English words because German is only spoken in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. There are some different reasons for this phenomenon. First of all, it's a technical matter because we don't have good equivalents for some words such as "handy", "home page", e-mail", "download", .... Those are words from the Internet or high-tech devices. Photo: Elisabeth Volquardts English words cover the front of a coffee shop in Hamburg, Germany.   Young people grow up with those expressions, but they are very hard for older people to understand sometimes. My sister-in-law's mother even told me not long ago that she was going to participate in a computer course because it happened to her from time to time that she didn't understand a word of what her children were talking about. And we don't have good equivalents for such words as "fast-food", .... The only used German expressions in the USA are—as far as I know—"Gesundheit" and "Kindergarten". So the English language has a much bigger effect on our language than the other way around. Furthermore, especially many young Germans mix their language with English so freely that their speech has a name—"Denglish". They think it's hip to speak with English phrases. They do not only use words like "event", "message", "cool", "o.k.", ..., but also create their own mixed words. One example besides all those hip phrases is the word "ticket." The use of this word is widespread. We use it like people do in the USA in many situations, but actually we have a lot of different expressions for those situations in German. Some people are concerned that those different words might be forgotten by the next generation. The word "ticket" is not really a hip-phrase anymore, but it's used because it's much easier to say just "ticket" instead of one of our different expressions which depend on the situation such as "Busfahrkarte", "Eintrittskarte", "Strafzettel" and so on. As you can see there are many reasons for the Americanization of our language. In my opinion, first of all you can't stop this development in times of high-tech and the Internet. The world is getting smaller and smaller every day; the world situation has changed. Secondly, as I said before, every language is constantly changing. But that is not supposed to mean that we don't have to protect our own culture. We have to watch this phenomenon and try to prevent that our language does totally degenerate. But I don't think that this will actually happen. Return to: What's Happening to Our Languages? | What is Globalization? | Home Page TOPICS Online Magazine - ©1997-2008 topics.mag@gmail.com Published by Sandy and Thomas Peters