Until Will first alerted me to a recent blog post in the NY Times,  I’d never heard of the term Denglish.

Denglish is the term used to describe English words that have crept their way into everyday usage in German, words that are now often used instead of their  “real” German counterparts. The word Denglish is a combination of the “D” from “Deutsch” (the word for the German  language in German) and “English”.  The blog post describes a recent campaign by the German National railway system, Deutsche Bahn (DB), to stamp-out the “scourge” of Denglish from their own website.

Now, I’ve read in the past about how in France there are groups that legislate against using English (or other language) terms instead of French words, and I think there’s a similar type of movement in Russia against English-borrowings that have been sneaking into the language there. So, the phenomenon of Denglish isn’t a new one, cross-linguistically.

But I hadn’t heard about this as a “problem” here in Germany, although, I will admit I don’t read German newspapers as often as I should to keep current on these kinds of issues. I am familiar with many Denglish terms in German, though, and I do recognize that I run across quite a lot of them in use around here every day.

However,  I never really think of then as English words being used in German, since the usage of the words is often not the same in German as it is in English, even though the German Denglish words look like and sound (somewhat) like the English words.

For example, Handy in German is a noun, not an adjective as it is in English.  In Germany, a Handy is the word for a cell-phone. While that it indeed a handy device,  I don’t believe using the word Handy alone to mean a cell phone has caught-on yet in English-speaking countries.

Likewise, Beamer is the word in German for overhead projector. I.e., it’s  a machine that can connect to and project an image from a laptop, for example. I used one just the other day when teaching a photography workshop at the d.a.i. – they have a  Beamer permanently mounted on the ceiling in their big presentation room.  In the U.S. classrooms might also have these devices mounted on the ceiling, but they would be called “projectors” there, not Beamers, I believe.

BTW, a “beamer” to me is slang in English for how to refer to a BMW car, although I’m not quite sure why BMW is pronounced  “beamer”, come to think of it.

But I digress.

Anyway, one thing that’s funny to observe among native English-speakers living here in Germany s that we adopt these Denglish words and their German meanings even when speaking in English, and even if we’re speaking to other native English speakers. I’m not quite sure that the psychology of that is, exactly. I don’t think I’d use the term Handy, for example,  if I was talking to another English speaker while standing in a city in the U.S., but here in Tübingen I find myself doing just that on occasion.

Now, I’ve never thought of Deutsche Bahn as using that much Denglish on their website, so I was surprised to read that they consider it such a huge problem that have formed a whole commission to figure out how to combat the problem. I used to use their website to book train tickets back when we lived in Italy,  before I understood anything in German. I don’t recall ever recognizing many words on their German pages back then. But the idea is that too much English, in the form of Denglish, is taking over for proper German on the website. So, I decided to make a quick check of their current website.  To keep things simple for this post, I decided to limit my research to the navigational menus that run across the top of the page in the red strip. I then also looked at the English website for comparison to determine which menu names on the German page I would mark as Denglish:

Menus:

Denglish words  in Red
Standard German in Green
Standard English in Blue

German Menu: Startseite
Standard German word: Eingangsseite
English Menu:  Homepage

German Menu:  Angebotsberatung
Standard German word: Angebotsberatung
English Menu:  Offers

German Menu: Fahrplan & Buchung (literally “Timetable and Reservations”)
Standard German word: Fahrplan & Buchung
English  Menu:  no clear path to the equivalent page, so no direct equivalent on the menu

German Menu: Services
Standard German word: Dienstleistungen
English menu:  Services

German Menu: Bahncard (spelling is non-standard German)
Standard German spelling: Bahnkarte would have followed standard German spelling
English menu: not offered on the English version of the website, even though the German is just the name of a special program run by Deutsche Bahn, and I would have expected it to be used on the English website

German Menu: Login
Standard German word: Anmeldung
English word:  Login

German Menu: Urlaub
Standard German word: Urlaub (means “Vacation” in standard German)
English word:  Tourism

As you can see in the list above, there is a smattering of Denglish on the menu names. However, you’ll also note that there is not always a correspondence between the German version of the menu and the English menu, even if there’s a Denglish word used on the German site.  I’m not sure what to make of all the differences I discovered in the design of the content, actually. But I guess my informal survey of the site just supports my contention that they don’t really have lots of English-y stuff on that website, despite their fears that Denglish is eroding the use of German.

Anyway, it was quite the coincidence that the notion of Denglish should have come to my attention recently, since last week it turned up in the news yet again. It was announced that a Denglish word had just been  added to the official  Duden German dictionary. The Duden is to German what the Oxford English dictionary is to English.

Here’s the Denglish word that is now officially part of the German language. In keeping with press standards, I have used *** to replace the letters “hit” in the word below; it is spelled out completely in the dictionary:

S***storm: Noun, masculine – a storm of protest in a communications medium of the internet, which is associated in part with insulting remarks. (definition from Duden Online, translated here into English)

Pardon my Denglish, but the DB folks may have to launch their own S•••storm about having the word now part of the official German dictionary, if they are going to have any success in their own fight against Denglish. I mean,  Angela Merkel is on record as using S***storm in a public speech. That being the case,  DB is going to be hard pressed to get people to rally around using Anmeldung instead of Login, for example.

I’m just saying.