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The German Vocabulary

An interview with Heinrich Detering, president of the German Academy for Language and Literature, to mark the final event in the Goethe-Institut’s “German 3.0” series.

27.11.2014
© Eric AudrasOnoky - Deutsch 3.0

In your speech at the launch of the German 3.0 series of events, you said: “The stomach of the German language has digested am amazing amount in the last 100 years.” What did you mean by that?
The German language has seen its vocabulary hugely expanded and its basic grammatical forms transformed as a result of industrialization and modernization. One immediately thinks of anglicisms such as “service point” and forgets just how long ago this process began and how intensive it was. This can be seen from a foreign borrowing such as the word “film”: as late as the 1920s, the German-speaking community was unable to agree what the plural should be: “Films” or “Filme”. At the time, it was decided that “Films” was better. This illustrates how the absorption of foreign words into a language is simply part and parcel of the introduction of new cultural technologies, media or forms of communication. I would urge people to regard this initially as a productive and inspiring process rather than instantly thinking in terms of what may have been lost.

Are you saying that fears about a “decline of language” – not least as a result of the new media – are unjustified?
What we have been experiencing over the past 100 years, first and foremost with English, is something that already happened two centuries earlier with French and in the Renaissance era with Italian. The very emergence of a German literary language in the High Middle Ages took place in intensive exchange with Latin. Even the most stubborn language purists would no longer use the word “Windauge”, but would say “Fenster”, despite this being a foreign borrowing from Latin. In its first “Report on the State of the German Language”, the German Academy for Language and Literature reviewed precisely these changes to the vocabulary and came to the conclusion that the German vocabulary has never been as rich as it is today.

German 3.0 also explored the question of German as a language of business. To what extent does our language play a significant role in this context?
In business in particular one would expect that English could adequately serve the purpose of communication. It would appear, however, that economic success also depends on whether those involved are able reasonably well to speak and understand the mother tongues of their respective business partners. No-one could deny the necessity of a lingua franca in business, or indeed in any other area. The only question is whether it should not perhaps be supplemented by other languages.

Final event in the “German 3.0” series on 1 December 2014 at the Museum for Communication in Berlin

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