NY TIMES 25 Sept 2013
By ANNA SAUERBREY OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
How Do You Say ‘Blog’ in German?
WE Germans owe the English language a debt of gratitude. If English didn’t lend us one or two little words every once in a while, we would probably call blogs “digitale Netztagebücher” and apps “Anwendungen für mobile Endgeräte.” Even for German speakers, those don’t exactly roll off the tongue.
Such linguistic borrowing has been increasing, as technology both creates its own new words and facilitates the global spread of newfangled cultural terminology. Recently the editors of the Duden dictionary, the German equivalent of the Oxford English Dictionary, added 5,000 new words to its 26th edition, many of them English or of English origin, including “digital native” and “flashmob.”
The Duden has been around since 1880, and this isn’t the first time English words have been added. But the new edition has caused an uproar among linguistic conservatives. After the additions were announced, the German Language Society, an unofficial organization that has tasked itself with protecting the German language, voted the editors of the Duden the “language adulterers of the year,” accusing them of legitimizing the demise of German.
Most Germans are more liberal in their linguistic views and generally agree that the idea of protecting a country’s language is as megalomaniacal as it is futile.
It certainly doesn’t represent the view of the majority of my generation, the 20- and 30-somethings, who generally have a relaxed relationship with both languages. Our parents associated German music with Nazi propaganda and opted for Springsteen-only musical diets, but we embrace the renaissance of German pop and rap lyrics. At the same time, we see no harm in integrating English words into our language.
But the society’s stance has nevertheless touched a chord across German society, particularly among people you might call anti-cosmopolitans: those who feel unable to keep up with an internationalization they feel is being imposed on them.
That the reaction should come now, in a rapidly homogenizing Europe, is unsurprising. The feeling of speaking increasingly marginalized languages is vivid in many parts of Europe, even in countries with large populations of native speakers like France and Germany.
Of course, the motives for defending one’s language differ from country to country. In France, it is part of a quest to bolster the country’s self-perception as a still-functioning colonial power. It is government policy that radio stations must play a certain minimum amount of French music.
In Germany, the driving force comes from the opposite direction. Refusing to accept the internationalization of the German language is a way of rejecting internationalization as a phenomenon. It is a nativist attempt to stand up to globalization.
Walter Krämer, the president of the society, articulated this point of view when he lambasted the Duden for including Anglicisms commonly used by “braggers” — what in previous generations might have been called yuppies. There is some truth in that. The frequent use of English words has become a status symbol, not unlike a pair of pearl earrings or shopping at Whole Foods, a way of showing off your education. A way of saying that your world is bigger than that medium-size country in the middle of Europe that doesn’t even have the guts to support military action in Libya or Syria.
In Germany as in America, it is easy to make fun of such people. But as the German sociologist Ulrich Beck noted recently, cosmopolitanism is a reality, not a willfully chosen identity. There are those who will continue to embrace it and those who will see it as a threat, but it can’t be turned back, even if one insists, as the German Language Society does, on calling a laptop a “Klapprechner.”
As any English speaker fond of the term “schadenfreude” knows, German has its own share of wonderful, untranslatable words. One of those, “Zeitgenossen,” is particularly apt for the moment. If you look it up in a German-English dictionary, you will find that it means “contemporaries,” those who happen to live in the same day and age. But it means more than that. The German word “Genosse,” meaning “comrade” or “associate,” also implies a mutual responsibility.
Thus “Zeitgenossen” share a responsibility toward one another as well as toward the age they live in. It is an attitude that sees languages as complementary, not competitive, and sees the world as a continuum of cultures, rather than a set of distinct borders. It is an attitude I wish more of my fellow Germans would adopt.
Again, English, thanks for “digital natives.” In return, you can have “Zeitgenossen.” It’s yours. Take it. It is a wonderful linguistic paradox that one of the nations that currently struggle with the idea of cosmopolitanism should be able to express it best.
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