What's the German word for wanting to keep English out of Germany?
November 21, 2019 1:12 PM   Subscribe

 
Aktion Deutsche...This phrase never ends well.

"...and an email filter which rejects messages that include the Genderstern, an asterisk that represents the multiplicity of gender identities within German’s grammatical binary."

See.
posted by clavdivs at 1:36 PM on November 21, 2019 [22 favorites]


“What people gives up his own language, adopts another one, and then uses it wrong?”

Mein Herr... have you met English?
posted by Halloween Jack at 1:39 PM on November 21, 2019 [49 favorites]


So much seems weirdly left out in this article. No mention of the Duden, which absolutely is prescriptive and as far as I could tell ubiquitous in German households. Only passing mention to the fact that 'German' by which I guess these people mean Hochdeutsch, is not even universally spoken from the cradle among most modern ethnic Germans, let alone immigrants - Bayrisch was even less intelligible to me as an anglophone student of German than Swiss German, and its certainly not an obscure language. It's seems disingenuous to not even mention these things when discussing the Aktion Deutsche Sprache arguments if you're going to write about whether their 'advocacy' is in good faith or not, when even setting aside their objection to English, the idea that there is a universal German language that everyone agrees upon is... not true? Note I am not a linguist
posted by aiglet at 1:46 PM on November 21, 2019 [16 favorites]


Anglo-Saxon out of Lower Saxony!
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 1:54 PM on November 21, 2019 [13 favorites]


Of all the nationalist tendencies to worry about in that corner of the world, the Aktion Deutsche Sprache crackpots are the least important. I mean, come on.

This seems disingenuous.
posted by Omnomnom at 2:01 PM on November 21, 2019 [4 favorites]


> Mein Herr... have you met English?

American English is frequently used as Exhibit A by other nations' language purists for why they need a regulated standard language.
posted by at by at 2:01 PM on November 21, 2019 [3 favorites]


In fairness to the Germans, this seems to just be them copying the Académie Française. Not sure if stopping people from saying "le papier" instead of "le journal" is exactly ethnic nationalism.
posted by GuyZero at 2:02 PM on November 21, 2019 [6 favorites]


the idea that there is a universal German language that everyone agrees upon is... not true? Note I am not a linguist

And still you're 100% right. German is a pluricentric language (just like English, Spanish, French, and many many more) and there are (at least) three German 'standards', not one.

Leaving aside that language conservatism is always boring and lame and enables all sorts of garbage behavior - like already pointed out in clavdivs comment.
posted by bigendian at 2:02 PM on November 21, 2019 [5 favorites]


Mein Herr... have you met English?

Presumably not, because he's not lying insensate in an alley, missing half his prepositions.
posted by Holy Zarquon's Singing Fish at 2:03 PM on November 21, 2019 [35 favorites]


So much seems weirdly left out in this article.
+1. I agree that the multiplicities of German is one. Another is some sort of integration of the author's points about English ubiquity in Berlin with the rest of the article's (correct) description of how efforts at language preservation naturally veer to the anti-immigration right. It feels like the author just punts on trying to reconcile those two. That's fair, I don't have a good thesis either. I just hoped the article would explore that a bit.

Another big one is the role of American military occupation (technically ended in 1955) and military/cultural reliance/subordination (ongoing). Those I would expect in a critique from the left.
posted by daveliepmann at 2:07 PM on November 21, 2019


Best way to annoy 'em would be to ask about that Reform der deutschen Rechtschreibung von 1996. Always a spicy topic that one.
posted by scruss at 2:11 PM on November 21, 2019 [7 favorites]


Umm...what happened to the actual Ask here?

Anglesprechenangst? Or something like that?
posted by snuffleupagus at 2:26 PM on November 21, 2019


(Argh, nevermind about the ask, blue is not green.)
posted by snuffleupagus at 2:41 PM on November 21, 2019 [1 favorite]


SPRACHIMPERIALISMUSBEKÄMPFUNG
und
ANGLIZISMENINTOLERANZ

I mean, nobody in their right mind would string those together like that, but you could if you wanted!
posted by Omnomnom at 3:03 PM on November 21, 2019 [2 favorites]


The creation of the EU is the best thing since sliced Bauernbrot. But I can see how the various nations, cultures within nations, the love for the Heimatsland, is threatened by globalization. Then arises the concept of cultural appropriation, but are immigrants, guilty of cultural appropriation when they take on the culture where they move, for whatever reason they move there?

Old English and Old German are very nearly the same language, and there were people who cross translated each other's works, like Longfellow, and Goethe. New technologies get new names, and it seems naming rights should go to the creators. I think the EU is one thing, and then Mandarin naming of new things, and Japanese naming of new things, and every other creator naming of new things, will make a modern hodgepodge. People get nervous, especially when they feel left behind, or they think their power platforms are eroding.

I am a fan of change, since that is what is. How we communicate, as well as what we communicate about, changes. Our roles in society, change, so, language changes as well. I spent 6 years of my life in Germany, I speak the language, it doesn't make me anything, except a fan of the place, and the people. I am now learning Spanish, since I have been immersed in it forever. Learning that is fun because each lesson, clarifies so many questions about why things are named as they are, and clarifies what I have been hearing so long.

Language is fun stuff, idiom, and accent, dialect, and all. Switzerdeutsch, is like trying to speak Deutsch without moving your lips, kind of the same for Bayerische dialect. But go to the Alsace Lorraine, then you hear French and German combine with the most amazing accent. No complaints from me.

I can bet the US has many more white supremacists than Germany current day. And keep in mind Americans are in the EU trying to dismantle it day and night, in the name of nationalism, of each smaller state; highly destructive work by Bannon et all.
posted by Oyéah at 3:17 PM on November 21, 2019 [3 favorites]


Wir mussen ein Englischfrei Deutsche sprache haben!
posted by lathrop at 3:22 PM on November 21, 2019


Aside from Icelandic, is any other Germanic language under adult supervision from an academy of language purists?
posted by ocschwar at 3:27 PM on November 21, 2019 [1 favorite]


For Germanic languages Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, and Dutch also have language regulatory organizations. Here's a list. None for English!

I've had the thought before that the spirit of "Don't tell ME what to do!" runs deep in American culture. I suspect we inherited it from the British and it might be a British/Anglosphere thing since the Magna Carta a thousand years ago was basically the nobility telling the king, "you're not going to tell us what to do!" Also it seems to be the thing (the otherwise pretty much insane) Brexit tapped into.
posted by Blue Tsunami at 4:19 PM on November 21, 2019 [3 favorites]


OK, I read this article and learned that I love “Beamer” for projector. My exchange student year in Austria occurred pre-Beamer, so I never learned this vocab - I will add it to the list next to “Handy” for the most initially ridiculous German word for technology but one that grows on you until you keep wanting to use in English. My brother always reminds me that the first night I came home, I tried to unlock his Nokia cell phone and shouted in frustration, “Star sieben?! What is with this handy?”
posted by Maarika at 4:20 PM on November 21, 2019 [5 favorites]


I suspect we inherited it from the British

I suspect you got it, more specifically, from the Scots and Irish who were a little tired of being told what to do by the English.
posted by GuyZero at 4:24 PM on November 21, 2019 [3 favorites]


skimming through their wordlist, I have to say that "Elektrorad" is objectively superior to "e-bike"
posted by vibratory manner of working at 4:37 PM on November 21, 2019 [8 favorites]


The one thing I don't get is the filter for the automatic rejection of gender neutral language. From reading the German Wikipedia (which google translate did beautifully, shockingly so), it seems that there's another method, using a capital I in the middle of the word (I don't know how German language gendering works, so I'm unclear on what's going on), but given that this isn't an importation of anything English (it's not like they're importing the pronoun "they" or anything), what is the objection? Is it just that organizations like this one naturally attract bigots, so in addition to not counting the Turkish dialect of German or Yiddish, you also don't considered non-binary people human?
posted by Hactar at 4:39 PM on November 21, 2019 [1 favorite]


"Hintergrundmusik", on the other hand, is not an appropriate replacement for "easy listening", unless the latter has undergone a meaning shift in german.
posted by vibratory manner of working at 4:40 PM on November 21, 2019 [2 favorites]


The mistake a lot of these people make is to consider any language 'fixed' or otherwise immutable. And this is especially stupid with German, one of the few major European languages that has several versions of it all floating about and cohabiting in the same spaces. And drifting between all of those spaces is English, which has less cases and all of the Marvel movies.
posted by The River Ivel at 4:57 PM on November 21, 2019 [6 favorites]


what is the objection? Is it just that organizations like this one naturally attract bigots, so in addition to not counting the Turkish dialect of German or Yiddish, you also don't considered non-binary people human?

That's pretty much it. It's antifeminism and antigenderism, plain and simple. These organizations (and a significant portion of the general public) construe the masculine form as a 'neutral standard' and reject most, if not all, forms of gender-neutral and gender-inclusive language. Even to the detriment of accuracy, ironically.

The method with the capital I you were curious about: many feminine forms of professions take the suffix -in (in singular) or -innen (in plural). The English word 'teachers' includes people of all genders, and many German speakers would use the word 'Lehrer' to express the same. However, 'Lehrer' is the masculine form - so in a mixed group women are only implied, or rather rendered invisible. (And other gender identities aren't represented in this form at all...) So people concerned about inclusivity started splitting the word into two, 'Lehrer und Lehrerinnen' (i.e. 'male teachers and female teachers'). The capital-I method was then established as a shortform: 'LehrerInnen' equals 'Lehrer und Lehrerinnen'.

Of course, organizations like the one above are likely to refuse even this single uppercase letter in their oh so beautiful German words. Gender-inclusive language that goes beyond the grammatical binary (most prominently, the use of a wildcard character to convey the language's deficiency when it comes to other gender identities, e.g. 'Lehrer*innen' or Lehrer_innen') is outright rejected.
posted by bigendian at 5:57 PM on November 21, 2019 [9 favorites]


I found this article which discusses praise of the Gender Star that also considers it an Anglicism.
posted by save alive nothing that breatheth at 6:25 PM on November 21, 2019


> Gender Star that also considers it an Anglicism

If anyone was as confused by this as I was, it appears it is not the use of the star itself that is considered an Anglicism. These usages are things like like"Lehrer*innen" and beyond that, new usages like "jede*r Leser*in" and "der*die Besitzer*in" that allow the articles, pronouns, and the like that are normally given a gender in German, to become multi-gendered. Those don't strike me as very similar to anything we do in English (Latinx would be the most similar thing, I suppose). Instead it seems a pretty German solution to a specific German-language issue.

It's not that, but rather the word used to describe that usage, Gendersternchen, that is an Anglicism.

The "-sternchen" part of that isn't English; it's a perfectly normal German word ("little star" or "asterisk"). Rather it's the "Gender" part that is directly borrowed from English.

German has a perfectly good word for Gender, "Geschlecht". But apparently "Gender" is used more commonly in this context, so here we are.
posted by flug at 7:43 PM on November 21, 2019 [6 favorites]


Bayrisch was even less intelligible to me as an anglophone student of German than Swiss German, and its certainly not an obscure language.

Bavarian could be said to be a separate Germanic language, only classified as a dialect of German for political reasons; somewhere between Sicilian and Catalan.
posted by acb at 1:20 AM on November 22, 2019


Setting up a German language academy with any sort of coercive power would be easier said than done, because the Bundesrepublik's constitution is pretty aggressive about preventing centralised power from existing (because we all know what happens when Germans get a strong central government, presumably). The best they would be able to do is to get, say, the Goethe Institut to take more of an interest in proposing etymologically Germanic alternatives to loanwords, and lobby the individual Lander to pass laws requiring these to be used in official contexts (which some—perhaps bourgeois Swabia or nationalistic Saxony—might do, though I can see others, like Berlin-Brandenburg, gleefully ignoring this).
posted by acb at 1:34 AM on November 22, 2019


(Latinx would be the most similar thing, I suppose).

Aren't some actual Spanish-speakers pushing back against this in favour of the more pronounceable gender-neutral form “Latine” these days?
posted by acb at 1:37 AM on November 22, 2019 [1 favorite]


I mean, just look at these maps of different words in different parts of the German speaking areas.
posted by dominik at 4:29 AM on November 22, 2019 [1 favorite]


I suspect you got it, more specifically, from the Scots and Irish

I'll see your Ulster Scots etc., and raise you a lengthy article that it's all about Vikings. Isn't this kind of explanation basically ethnic determinism that fuels ideas about identity, us and them, and now we're not talking about linguistic trends any more? And there's a whole group of people who want to construct their lives around fantasies of Celtic romanticism, partly because it's the perfect cultural vermiculite for the American ideal of the brave and self-determining cowboy. [Opus] Bleahhhh. [/Opus]

Sorry about the tangent.
posted by sneebler at 7:48 AM on November 22, 2019 [2 favorites]


Distrust of loan words is a shibboleth.
posted by Devonian at 8:30 AM on November 22, 2019 [7 favorites]


Some 26% of English vocabulary is comprised of loan words from Germanic languages in the first place.
posted by Acey at 9:35 AM on November 22, 2019


This is an interesting topic. The discussion on anglicisation in Europe goes back decades. Notorious was the 1994 Toubon law in France, mandating the use of the French language in a wide range of public contexts, which at the time was widely ridiculed, and scrutinized by the EU Commission as a possible forbidden trade barrier. Recently it was discussed in a CityLab piece on language protection / protectionisme.

It's a pretty draconian law. Of course the French have a rich history of language curation & cultivation, going back to the Académie française in the 16th century, founded by none other than draconian non plus ultra Richelieu. So it kind of makes sense they would be draconian about it. The French are allowed a little draconian. Germans not so much.

I've long submitted to the school of thought that there's a kind of futility about language prescriptivism. On the other hand it seems preposterous that the way people use language does not matter.

For example, I think there's a real thoughtlessness that comes from parroting English public relations jargon. Already nebulous ideas are received in translation with even less substance to them, then used to drive decision making at high levels in government & business. Now the language is in charge of your operation, but the development of that language happens elsewhere.

Like all languages, English reflects its own context onto its surroundings. Exclamations like "See you in court!" evoke a briskly legalistic, adversarial relationship between people. It normalizes expectations of behavior that are at odds with the EU law traditions which frown upon aggressive pre-trial attitudes. When a restaurant or coffee place decides to go with English signage, that cannot help but to imbue the space with a new purpose, audience, & dynamic. It becomes a place where people who are "not home" can feel comfortable. With that it ceases to be a place where you can go and grab a coffee, without yourself also being in a sense not home.
posted by dmh at 9:52 AM on November 22, 2019


I dunno, maybe it's just the 'Murcan you can't tell me what to do business, but it seems both futile and obnoxious to have an official body trying to decide what is and isn't part of a language. How can a language grow and evolve if we're too busy worrying about whether it's properly [insert language here] instead of just using the words most convenient?

I mean, as long as it's limited to just people being snooty it's ultimately no big deal and eventually the common usage will become official despite the efforts of the conservatives, but it seems a lot like officially recognized and tax supported shouting at kids to get off your lawn more than anything actually useful.

And if it it does have legal authority it seems actively harmful. I recall reading that Académie Française's slowness meant French contracts and EULA's couldn't say "CD-ROM" for several years because if they did the contracts wouldn't be enforceable in court due to using non-official French, but the Académie hadn't invented a "proper" word for CD-ROM so they had to spend paragraphs of circumlocutions every time they wanted to say it? Or is that an urban myth?
posted by sotonohito at 10:22 AM on November 22, 2019 [1 favorite]


How can a language grow and evolve if we're too busy worrying about whether it's properly [insert language here] instead of just using the words most convenient?

There are literally people who think that change is bad and not everyone shares a cultural bias towards novelty and/or convenience. That said, opposing change is usually futile.

Distrust of loan words is a shibboleth.

I think this is easy to say when you're part of the cultural hegemony that's winning. The fast death at the hands of actual Imperialism of many languages is considered a bad thing, the slow death of languages at the hands of hollywood, air traffic control and scientific paper publishing isn't a whole lot better.
posted by GuyZero at 11:03 AM on November 22, 2019 [2 favorites]


I think this is easy to say when you're part of the cultural hegemony that's winning.

You're not wrong, but as you say, it's basically futile. On the one hand I'm sympathetic to the argument that language is for communication and if no one speaks it then it seems pointless to preserve it. On the other hand, languages are themselves a record of a particular culture and when they are gone we lose that point of view and a part of history along with it.

So I think that, for instance, efforts to encourage the use of the Welsh language in Welsh schools is a worthwhile endeavour, lest we completely lose the ability to understand it and lose access to the cultural perspective and historic texts written in that language along with it. Not to mention that its disappearance is a direct result of imperialism on the part of the English (ditto Irish gaelic, etc).

I don't think we are at that point with German, but there are severely endangered and indeed already extinct languages all over the world, which we have duty to protect in much the same way as we have a duty to protect endangered species.

In conclusion, Libya is a land of contrasts. Thank you.
posted by Acey at 11:25 AM on November 22, 2019 [2 favorites]


I have some conflicting feelings about this sort of thing. As a linguist, I think major languages like German and French objecting to borrowings is foolish (and about five centuries too late). Languages like Quechua, Japanese, and English have borrowed massively without being lost or destroyed. (English is not even on the far end of the scale.)

At the same time, GuyZero is right that "this is easy to say when you're part of the cultural hegemony that's winning." As English speakers, we simply don't see massive borrowings into our language and perhaps shouldn't set ourselves up as experts on what it means or feels like. (English did undergo massive borrowings— many centuries ago.)

Endangered languages are a red herring here. German is not endangered because they're using the (rather charming) der Beamer. (There is an overlap in concerns though: if you're trying to preserve a language, probably one thing you should do is coin words for modern technology. The feeling that you can't talk about certain things in your native language is a problem that can lead people to speak the dominant language instead. But the coinages can perfectly well be borrowings.)
posted by zompist at 2:20 PM on November 22, 2019 [2 favorites]


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