Everything But The Weed

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After years of post-war Anglicisation and Americanisation, seven out of 10 Germans speak some English. But experts say there is a growing backlash against the widespread usage of foreign terms in the age of globalisation, technology and immigration. Business leaders are growing fed up of English “management speak”.

Angela Merkel A fortnight ago, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservative party voted to enshrine the German language inside the nation’s constitution. And German companies are beginning to shy away from relying on English for their marketing and advertising slogans, after a period of using the foreign language so frequently that sometimes their own customers didn’t understand what they were referring to.

“A lot of individuals have decided that enough is enough,” said Roland Kaehlbrandt, author of a book called German for Elites. “They aren’t taking companies that only use English seriously any longer. We have been very open-minded and tolerant of anything that originates from outside, but there’s a fear now that we might forget our very own language as well as our own culture.”

After the war and during the Cold War in West Germany, English – particularly from the influence of the United states – was simply cooler than German, he explained.

English <a href=”http://www.todaytranslations.com”>translation services</a> have traditionally had good relations with German businesses due to the interest in English, and long may it continue. In addition, historically the German and British economies have conducted large sums of trade over hundreds of years.

A minimum of 60 per cent of new words used in Germany today are English.

“That’s too much,” Mr Kaehlbrandt said. “It’s not because of functionality. German is a very functional language. But there’s a side to Germany that – unconsciously, I think – is attempting to get rid of our heritage to get rid of the past, that is conceived to be linked to the crimes from the Nazis. But we’ve changed profoundly since then. And German language is significantly older than the Nazis.”

Walter Kraemer, with the German Language Association, which claims 32,000 members and campaigns to safeguard German, said the country’s science and industry were being damaged as Germans fell back on English jargon and technical terms, when dealing with other Germans.

“There is no way around English,” said Mr Kraemer, an economist and statistician. “It’s the international language. But before you communicate, you need to be innovative, imaginative, creative, and you can’t do that properly in a language that’s not your own. People think better in their own language. German science is suffering due to this.”

He said that after DaimlerChrysler was manufacturing cars in Stuttgart using English in the factories, it had the greatest product recall rate in the land, whereas Porsche, which uses only German language, has minimal recalls.

Annette Trabold, a linguist at the Institute for German Language in Mannheim, which studies dialects and trends in German <a href=”http://www.todaytranslations.com”>translation services</a>, declared that all languages were fluid and therefore it had been no real surprise that Germany had absorbed so much English.

“In 2006, when Germany hosted the world cup 2006, that was the first time it was really ok again to fly the German flag, to be able to paint it on your face. It had become a real change.”