Denglish

There are several different kinds of Denglisch. One is the English word that has become fully
standard in German: das Baby is the normal way to refer to a new human, edging out the older
Sugling (charmingly cognate to the English suckling). Baby is now also a term of endearment in
German, just as in English.
Further along the spectrum are words that Germans use but which have not entirely edged out their
ur-German rivals. Take Das Basement, spotted in a Berlin shopping mall. The word is still less
common than the native Untergeschoss. But Johnson was surprised, and even a little displeased, to
spot it for the first time. Das Basement, really? What on earth is wrong with Untergeschoss? Is it
because the shopping mall is quintessentially American?
If this were not bad enough, some of the borrowing seems incompetent. What Brits call a mobile
and Americans call a cell phone, Germans call a Handya word that looks borrowed from English,
but isnt. The baseball capa common faux-hip ornament in todays Germanyis a Basecap. And
Germans call table football Kicker, a game unknown in the English-speaking world. (The mangling
goes both ways, as Americans alter the German Fussball to foosball.) And when a rude word is
borrowed, its taboo in the original language does not always travel with it. Angela Merkel is just
one of many Germans who don't realise that you can't just casually uses the word Shitstorm in a
press conference. The word has become common enough to be added to Germany's most
prestigious dictionary, the Duden.
Bastian Sick, who writes a language column for the Spiegel magazine, pokes gentle fun at Denglish.
Since the tide of Anglicisms cant be wished away, he at least wants to uphold standards in using
them. Foreign words can be made into German verbs by suffixing ieren (itself borrowed from the
French verb ending er). So interessieren and schockieren are nothing interesting or shocking. But
Germans are normalising such verbs: in one column, Mr Sick noticed a fellow journalist using the
past participles geschockt and gemarkt instead of shockiert and markiert. This means that the new
forms have the traditional German ge- that is added to native verbs, and omit the foreign-marking
ieren. Mr Sick finds this faddish and unappealing, but to the outsider, it's a lovely example of
language change happening before one's eyes.
Virtually every language borrows words (English quite promiscuously). These can be highborn
terms of philosophy and art or the common Basecap, depending on the cultural contact any two
languages are having at a given time. (Its no surprise to see so many terms from pop culture and
technology coming from English.) One linguist, Guy Deutscher, has aptly compared language to a
reef. It is constantly growing, borrowing, changing, livingbut we only notice the new additions on
top. Long ago changes, once fads or errors, now form the solid foundation. So it is with
German, and even Denglish. Purists, take heart.