Guest article: Should English become the official language?

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Bus in Berlin: Confused Denglish language mix

Photo: Wolfram Steinberg / picture alliance

When Carsten Spohr, the head of Lufthansa, recently sent a mailing to his frustrated customers, he could only explain the chaos in the aviation industry in one English word: "We've had two hard years of perceived and actual grounding

«

Fair enough, one might have thought.

Wasn't it just another example of the ubiquity of superfluous English words and phrases?

Everyone knows that they run through our mother tongue like the chaotic pattern in a carpet.

The fact that Education Minister Bettina Stark-Watzinger (FDP) recently advocated making English the "second language in administration" sounded like a tired suggestion at first, simply because it wasn't the first time it came from the FDP.

This time it was only the eighth out of ten points in an "immigration program for skilled workers" - apparently guided by the assumption that job seekers from abroad who do not speak German will in any case speak English.

The proposal should still be taken seriously – and not only with a view to administration.

After all, there is a growing number of English terms in the German language that are more than jewelry.

Since there are no exact equivalents for them, they have taken on native-speaker tasks.

is one of them, which is something different than comedy.

Or the

.

Or

and many more.

So does

.

No question: As an officer in the air, you speak like Carsten Spohr today.

This also gives two reasons why English is often preferred.

Firstly, to be understood worldwide, i.e. for communication that is as lossless and barrier-free as possible.

Second, to be taken seriously by one's peers, which often creates new barriers for those who don't speak English.

It is these constraints on so-called connectivity and distinction from which no working person is free.

sounds

less precise, not to say

than any take-off ban or any forced landing.

Another motif lies in the blur

for anglicisms:

is less aggressive than

less official than

less diligent than

check-up ,

less vulgar than

less dramatic than

and »Clap your hands!« less clumsy than » Clap your hands (everybody)!”.

In addition to these factors that make us so vulnerable to English, the following also applies: every language develops from an interrelationship of anarchy and rules, the human urge for change and a structural resistance from above.

The English language develops conspicuously freely, which has to do with the fact that its area of ​​development extends over large parts of the world and the supervision of it is not organized at any central center - neither an academy nor a dictionary office.

This leads to a special receptiveness and diversity and justifies their outstanding position in creating an understanding of the world - an understanding that the German language can no longer create in this way.

The anarchic reflex - and arguably the right - in our language community is therefore to flee to English.

This process takes place on several levels.

On the one hand, we expand our expression with semantic-cognitive units of meaning of an only supposedly foreign language.

This is reflected in countless words and phrases in cultural references such as book and film quotes, song lyrics or advertising slogans such as "The winner takes it all" or "Yes, we can".

Anyone who just follows the word and language games that the SPIEGEL editorial team comes up with with a certain amount of regularity will recognize the meaningful potential of our linguistic escape – recently, for example, in the headline “Games of Drones”.

On the other hand, the really special thing about a word like

is that it makes a lot of things understandable very quickly.

You have to look at the ending for that.

The suffix "-ing" is so trending in the English-speaking world that, strictly speaking, the world does not speak English at all, but Inglish: The effects on German are reflected in well-known examples such as

and in newer terms such as

– and whatever else has recently been added.

It is a remarkable combination of noun, action and attribute, i.e. the gerund, the present participle and the famous English progressive.

In this way, the thing with »-ing« creates a linguistic compression that German cannot achieve at all.

The translation of

in Duden makes it clear: "The (unforeseen) complete cessation of the services of a company, especially an airline" - which does not even explain all the meanings.

In order to avoid such complicated paraphrases, we have long been importing a specific, snappy way of functioning from English.

So not only the logos, but increasingly also the logic of English flows into our mother tongue.

Since the world is turning faster than we can still write poetry, we have to assume a linguistic change that will make German even more English than it already is.

Our ruling parties have long been using an arsenal of deadly serious Anglicisms – which makes the idea of ​​English as a necessary second language seem more contemporary than ever: in top-level politics, people have long been English-speaking in a certain, strangely hybrid way.

A total of 60 political Anglicisms were found in the program of the FDP last year, more than 30 in the program of the Greens, around 20 in the CDU/CSU and the Left and 14 in the SPD - and all that in more than nine out of ten cases without translation or explanation .

Political competition is based on terms such as

or

.

A hybrid language guide

Of course, it is also about the compulsion for linguistic compatibility, for distinction and for a linguistic deviation - but it also shows that German must be able to change in order to be able to keep up with the world.

Which doesn't mean it's going away.

Similar to hybrid warfare or a hybrid drive that combines old and new forces, German and English-speaking parts are pooled for the contemporary expression.

To a certain extent, they form a hybrid language - which was shown, for example, in Olaf Scholz' keynote speech on the new German foreign policy.

While in parliament he spoke in state-supporting German of the »Zeitenwende«, English is used to express new ideas and operational actions at the operational level - just think of the currently popular military jargon of NATO:

or

.

Meanwhile, during the pandemic, there was talk of

or

.

There are also very unsuccessful mixed forms: the FDP, of all people, has been spreading slogans such as "Digital first, second concerns" or "Make in Germany" in recent years.

The 2021 federal election campaign also called for “top sharing”, a kind of job sharing for executives, which, however, promised less to expand professional horizons and more to exchange outerwear.

It was the kind of "English made in Germany," which includes "spousal splitting," which would be considered a felony in the rest of the English-speaking world.

Or the nonsense »The Länd«, which is officially carried around in Baden-Württemberg - loosely based on the Swabian saying »We can do everything except German« ... and English.

But even the confused Denglish language mix requires a minimum level of English language skills.

Projections by the Allensbach Institute show that they will not be a matter of course in Germany in 2022 either.

In 2021, around 35 million people in Germany were convinced that they had a good to very good command of English, while around 36 million people believed they could speak “little to no English at all”.

The country is deeply divided linguistically, so I would like to speak of a »language gap«.

Although the progressive Anglicization of German does not automatically mean that we will be able to communicate in English without misunderstandings in the future, it inevitably means that without knowledge of English, misunderstandings will become more and more common in our own language area.

A few weeks ago I observed in the Berlin-Schöneberg district office how an employee held up the passport of an English-speaking woman and said: »Take a look at me!« Sounded like a request for a critical examination, she would have said »Please look this way!« – »Please look in this direction (so that I can compare your face with the picture)!«

It is this awkwardness that does not create what probably many of the 35 million English-savvy people in Germany have long claimed in their CVs: negotiating security.

We have created a language-cultural reality that makes it very easy to overestimate one's own knowledge of English.

more on the subject

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It will certainly be a long time, at least a generation, before our public life is actually as English-speaking as German-speaking and deserves to be called »bilingual«.

The obligation of this »hybrid-speaking« federal government to promote broad language competence in the population seems all the greater to me.

Everyone - not just the people in government agencies and those who live in multilingual relationships, who hold positions like Carsten Spohr or who can send their children to schools abroad - should have the opportunity to communicate in English in everyday life.

It goes without saying that this understanding must be practiced in order for it to become practice.

So what we need is a politically desired and generously funded learning by doing.

Otherwise there is a risk of society being divided once again – and ultimately linguistic grounding.