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The English words floating above this sentence were captured from mainline German websites an dem Nacht 25 November 2001. They are currently being detained as material witnesses by the language cops.
One Small Step toward the One-World Language.
Call it hybrid German-English fashionable speech, trendy and oh so pop....
Or label it an encroachment of epic proportions by English upon Deutsch.... (Though we wonder, what is an epic proportion?)
Or demonize it as a bastardized tongue, definitely verboten: Speak it, the language cops warn, and you shall stand accused of crime.
Denglisch? Michael Quinion, the British scholar and critic, defines (as deeply as anyone) the meaning of the word. His definition appears just below. The grammatical slope which Denglisch ascends is slippery, rock-strewn, and poorly charted. Imprecise? You bet. Even the spelling is an object of debate. We at Planet Deutsch prefer to add the c and spell it Denglisch, but we're certainly not doctrinaire about the issue. You can visit Mr. Quinion's website,
 World Wide Words: Exploring the English Language to look into the question and other issues of language. Here's what Mr. Quinion writes:
"It's open to debate whether this is really an English word, though it has been seen in a number of English-language publications in recent months, because it was actually coined in German. Its first letter comes from Deutsch, the German for German, plus Englisch, the German for English (it is sometimes anglicised to Denglish). It refers to the hybrid German-English fashionable speech of younger Germans, heavily influenced in particular by American English.
It's perhaps only to be expected that computerese such as e-mail and homepage are standard. Outside computing, you may encounter task force, party, shopping, goalgetter, and sales among many others. On German railways, you will find service points, ticket counters and lounges.
"Many Germans have been angered by what they see as the linguistic imperialism of such imports. Some, such as Eckart Werthebach, the regional interior minister in Berlin, have called for a language purification law to ban them; others have suggested an Academy for the Cultivation and Protection of the German Language, like the Académie Française. What annoys them especially is the way that English words infiltrate otherwise normal German sentences. An example was a notice seen at a German airport: 'Mit dem stand-by-upgrade-Voucher kann das Ticket beim Check-in aufgewertet werden'.
"Denglish joins a variety of other words of similar kind, such as Japlish, Chinglish (Chinese), Konglish (Korean), Russlish, Hinglish (Hindi), Spanglish, Polglish (Polish), Dunglish (Dutch), Singlish (Singaporean English) and Swenglish (Swedish), not to mention Franglais, of course."
World Wide Words is copyright © Michael Quinion, 1996-. All rights reserved.
Einfach Besser, or Simply the Best?
Preponderance of Anglicisms.
Why Do Languages Go to War?
Sie müssen sich doch nur ansehen, wer dieses Geschwafel in unserem Lande eigentlich verzapft. ...Das sind Leute, die glauben, ihre Halbbildung könnten sie dadurch steigern, daß sie sich, weil es als schick gilt, plötzlich nicht mehr in Deutsch ausdrücken.
— Staatsminister im Auswärtigen Amt Helmut Schäfer (FDP), auf einer Podiumsdiskussion in Hannover, 24. 10. 1999
Verein Deutsche Sprache e.V.
*This is the first step toward THE One World Language.
Tritt Zwei. Step Two: Subordination in a submarine!
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