Learn the meaning of Denglish
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Intro |
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| Michael: What is Denglish? |
| Igor: And what are the other ways in which the German language evolves? |
| Michael: At GermanPod101.com, we hear these questions often. Mark Lee learned how to talk like young adults in Germany. He shows his wife Karen Lee his new skill.. |
| "I'm a nice dude." |
| Mark Lee: Ich bin ein nicer Dude. |
| Dialogue |
| Mark Lee: Ich bin ein nicer Dude. |
| Karen Lee: Bitte was? |
| Michael: Once more with the English translation. |
| Mark Lee: Ich bin ein nicer Dude. |
| Michael: "I'm a nice dude." |
| Karen Lee: Bitte was? |
| Michael: "Excuse me?" |
Lesson focus |
| Michael: If we had to choose a modern lingua franca, English would be the first candidate. No other language has as many non-native speakers as English does. In modern times, English is used for international businesses, for diplomatic purposes, and also to bring people from different countries together. It's one of the most influential languages, so it's no wonder that it influences other languages themselves. This can, for example, be observed in German with the rising number of English loanwords, called anglicisms or |
| Igor: Anglizismen |
| Michael: This development is called |
| Igor: Denglisch. |
| Michael: The word "Denglish" is a fusion of the words |
| Igor: Deutsch |
| Michael: meaning "German," and |
| Igor: Englisch |
| Michael: or "English" in the German language. Some people do not appreciate this development and fear that German might become a hybrid of English and German in the future. And, indeed, you might hear some people saying, |
| Igor: Lass uns heute Abend zu der Party gehen und die location abchecken. |
| Michael: meaning "Let's go to the party tonight, and check out the location." |
| English loanwords are everywhere in Germany. If you plan to go on a vacation, you'll have the option of booking an |
| Igor: All inclusive Urlaub |
| Michael: meaning "all inclusive vacation." Or you might experience a |
| Igor: Sommer Sale |
| Michael: meaning literally "summer sale." The usage of English words increased in Germany after the second world war as a result of the American occupation of Western Germany. Before the war, Germans used to translate English words literally; that's why a "skyscraper" is called |
| Igor: Wolkenkratzer |
| Michael: in German, where |
| Igor: Wolken- |
| Michael: means Clouds and |
| Igor: -kratzer |
| Michael: means scraper. |
| In fact, the term "Denglish" is a pejorative term to describe this fusion. A German band called "Wise Guys" even wrote a song about this phenomenon. It's title is |
| Igor: Denglisch |
| Michael: and it mocks how German speakers tend to replace German words with English equivalents whenever possible. |
| [Recall 1] |
| Michael: Let's take a closer look at the dialogue. |
| Do you remember how Mark says "I'm a nice dude." |
| (pause 4 seconds) |
| Igor: Ich bin ein nicer Dude. |
| Michael: Have you heard how the English words were adapted into German grammar? This is one of the main features of Denglish. Even if the words are coming from English, they become part of German speech and have to follow German grammar rules. So let's look at the word "nice." In our example Mark said, |
| Igor: nicer |
| Michael: As you can hear, he added the suffix "-er," common for German adjectives, making it a proper adjective. The English word "dude," however, didn't get a new ending, but you can consider it a noun, and, if written down, the first "d" becomes a capital letter in German. |
| [Summary] |
| Michael: In this lesson, you learned that German speakers tend to adopt English words into their vocabulary. This is also called "Denglish," and while some people might promote this practice, others will see it as a harm for the language. |
| To give you a better understanding of how "Denglish" works, let's hear some examples of how it's used. The first is |
| Igor: Nach dem Konzert gab es Standing Ovations, |
| Michael: meaning "After the concert, there were standing ovations." Standing ovations have been directly taken from English and both words are capitalized in German. |
| The next example is, |
| Igor: Mein Laptop ist kaputt, kannst du die Kundenhotline anrufen? |
| Michael: This means "My laptop is broken. Could you call the customer hotline?" There are two loanwords. While the first is just a direct rip off from English, the second is more interesting. You can hear that the the English word "hotline" is merged with the German word |
| Igor: Kunde |
| Michael: meaning "customer," making it a compound noun made of words from two different languages. Next is |
| Igor: Ich habe das Video geliked und geshared. |
| Michael: Meaning "I liked and shared the video." You might hear this a lot in the context of YouTube. As you can hear "like" and "share" got the prefix "ge-" indicating the past. |
| Expansion/Contrast |
| Michael: Languages are often influenced by the leading pop culture at the time. For example, in the late 1980's and early 90's, a new music genre called rap was growing in popularity. At the time, many US soldiers were still stationed in the Western part of Germany. |
| They were organising Hip Hop jams, similar to those they knew from home, inviting German youth to party with them. |
| Eventually, this led to popularizing Rap and Hip Hop among German youngsters, who started to copy their American idols using the German language, while still adapting some specific hip hop terms into the German language. |
| This brought many slang terms into the German language such as, for example, |
| Igor: Beef, |
| Michael: meaning a dispute between two individuals. |
| The Rap medium has changed a lot since then. Today, German rap rules the German music industry occupying the music charts every week and it is mostly dominated by artists with migration backgrounds with their roots in either Turkey or Arabic countries. |
| The American influences were replaced by influences from Arabic, or Muslim cultures, and thus English was being replaced by Arabic loanwords. |
| You will often hear young people mixing Arabic or Turkish in their German speech, but also, due to some famous artists with Russian backgrounds, more and more Russian words find their way into the German language. |
| Some of the words that you might come across are |
| Igor: Haram |
| Michael: meaning something that is against God's rules in Arabic. So, drinking alcohol or eating pork is considered "haram" in Arabic cultures. In German, however, it became a synonym for something that is dishonorable. |
| The next word is |
| Igor: Bratan |
| Michael: This is a loanword from Russian slang and means "brother" as in good friends. |
| Our next word is, |
| Igor: Inshallah, |
| Michael: which is an Arabic word meaning "if God wills," and is expressing the hope that something will happen in the future. The next word is |
| Igor: Habibi. |
| Michael: You can use it with your friends to show them that they're important to you, although the literal translation is "my love." And the last one is |
| Igor: Alman, |
| Michael: coming from Turkish and literally meaning "a German." This word is used in German to point out that someone has a stereotypical German behaviour, such as being punctual. In this case, we could call a person |
| Igor: Alman |
| Cultural Insight |
| Michael: There is one more variation of "Denglish" in German, and it's called |
| Igor: Vong. |
| Michael: This, however, is a variation with a satirical undertone, and it's mostly spread on the social media platform Twitter, where the users are excessively using Anglicisms. Also, instead of following German grammar rules, they tend to follow English grammar or make grammatical mistakes on purpose. Similar to what we see from slang in English texting, the users often replace the indefinite article with a number, so instead of |
| Igor: ein, |
| Michael: a "vong" user would use |
| Igor: 1 [eins]. |
| Michael: While the hype around this type of language was trending around 2017, when a phrase associated with this language, |
| Igor: I Bims |
| Michael: meaning "I am," was chosen as the most influential youth word of the year, it still plays a role today in some communities. This language was also an inspiration for many artists, such as the German videomaker |
| Igor: Phil Laude, |
| Michael: who made entire videos using only the "vong" language, or the German comedian |
| Igor: Shahak Shapira, |
| Michael: who wrote a version of the Holy Bible using "vong." |
Outro |
| Michael: Do you have any more questions? We're here to answer them! |
| Igor: Tschüsschen! |
| Michael: See you soon!" |
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