Alexander Wells writes for the European Review of Books:
Whenever I leave my Berlin apartment, the first thing I see is a sign saying CHICKEN HAUS BURGER; the second is a café blackboard announcing: « You can’t buy happiness but you can buy CROIFFLE and that’s kind of the same thing. » A billboard advertises an upcoming film as « ein STATEMENT für GIRLPOWER »; one shop promises a wide range of Funsocken. Rather more disturbing — particularly here in Neukölln, a neighbourhood copiously populated by leftie Americans and families from the Middle East — is the Arabic-German barber shop called WHITE BOSS. And when I go downtown to the bookstore where I occasionally host readings, the only good coffee nearby is served by a place unbelievably named PURE ORIGINS. […]
Which is not to say that Berlin’s English-language readers — the natively anglophones plus many whose first language is Swedish, Spanish, Turkish or Arabic — do not know German at all. The Berlinglish they speak is informal English, slightly simplified, full of swears, nightlife slang and loan words — mostly adopted from German. Knowing the contours of this dialect is no small part of my editing work. Taken together, its German-to-English loans register all the points of cultural interface that an expat life simply cannot avoid — Rundfunk, Finanzamt, Anmeldung — as well as some that have made it across on account of their own attractive promises: Spätkauf, Flohmarkt, Falafelteller, Wegbier.
The English spoken by those newcomers who settle here and end up making some German friends and studying the language — it also absorbs subtler influences from German. The other day my friend S., an American Berliner, said that he had noticed his English-language social circle starting to use the word « spontaneously » wrong. When Germans say they’ll organise a social event spontan, they mean they’ll work out the details at short notice. To socialise spontaneously, in English, means something rather different. But S. and I and our Neukölln friends have started using it in the sense of spontan. « OK cool text me Sunday and we’ll choose a place spontaneously. » This error is becoming part of our little language, our ultra-local dialect, just among us.
At the moment, German newspapers describe any kind of drama as ein Shitstorm: who knows if that is here to stay. What leads a loan word to travel? Is it the fantasy of foreign places, the thrill of the exotic? Or is it a culture’s perception of its own shortcomings? Preeminent recent anglicisms in contemporary German — words like recycelt, Streamlining, queer, Smash, Gender-Wokismus, cringe, Slay, Sneaker-Release, Content-Manager — hint at a varied and vivid set of contact points.
Being an English native speaker in Berlin means wading daily through a sea of linguistic nonsense. « Be Coffee My Monkey » orders one café; another says « Make Coffee Love Magic ». At one of those cafés you might overhear Germans saying things like « das ist ein Gamechanger! » and « Hast du’s geliket? » and « Oh my God was für ein Fuck-My-Life-Moment ». On bad days, I worry that English has turned primarily into a status symbol — a tool of pure Habitus, a means for young elites to signify their cosmopolitanism and savviness. On days like that, it’s also hard to avoid the feeling that English — the language I inhabit, the tool I use to pay the rent and tell my wife I love her — is like too little butter spread out across too many bits of toast. […]
Related as they are, German and English are easily sutured onto one another — but this is a recipe for misunderstanding. I have learned to automatically correct false friends (intensiv means « intense » not « intensive »; a großes Thema is a « big issue » not a « big topic »). […]
I like how English loan words jam the rules of German grammar. I once read a discussion thread on a forum where people argued whether fighten — preferred by many German boxing fans, for some reason, over kämpfen — should take the past-participle gefightet, gefighted or gefaughtet. Certain German verbs are separable, which means you split the two parts in some sentence structures or in past-participle form. (Ausbeuten: ausgebeutet.) But do you separate imported English compound words? Once you start saying downloaden for « to download », you have to consider whether the past form is gedownloadet or downgeloadet. More recently I spent fifteen minutes of my only given time on God’s green earth trying to work out whether Queerbaiting would be separable when conjugated. […]
My favourite kind of anglicism is the Scheinanglizismus. Many languages across the world have these « pseudo-anglicisms », which consist of English phrases that are used in that language but don’t actually make sense in English. An overhead projector is called a Beamer here; a photo shoot is, rather alarmingly, a Shooting. During lockdown, the practice of working from home got dubbed das Homeoffice, much to the bafflement of Berlin’s UK contingent. A male model used to be called a Dressman, in a doublepseudo- anglicism: it’s the English verb « dress » tacked onto the elegant rump of « gentleman ». Best of all were short-lived attempts to market the messenger satchel to Germans as Bodybag. […]
The longer I live between languages, the more I realise that language is roomy; people’s minds, and lives, are roomy. If homogenization has a kryptonite, it is not the closing of borders but the survival of plurality. Here in Berlin, a cosmos of authors make hay in the linguistic collision zones. The Japanese-born novelist and translator Yoko Tawada describes language in botanical terms — in her work, it evolves and grows as if in cracks between the paving. Uljana Wolf’s recent essay collection Etymologisches Gossip is powered by puns, associative threads and philolo-riffs taken from German as well as English. Ulrike Draesner’s poetry sequence Doggerland, meanwhile, recreates that ancient Anglo-Germanic land bridge through a polyphonic mixture of German, English and their shared linguistic ancestors. I went to see her live and it was unforgettably unsettling.
More at the link; I was both amused and educated, learning (for instance) the phrase cross and inshallah, which Urban Dictionary defines as “A style of football that commonly played with one or more players mindlessly spamming crosses into the box and praying for a player to be on the receiving end” (you can see more discussion, as well as a photogenic cat, here).
Or even downg’loaden, as I heard in Vienna once 25 years ago. But the easy way out is to calque: herunterladen, past participle heruntergeladen.
Neither separable nor inseparable – like notlanden “perform an emergency landing”. The forms where the issue would come up would be avoided altogether.
I don’t think “the natively anglophones” is grammatical for me. “The natively anglophone” would be OK, and refer to a group of people, but when you’ve nominalized an adjective enough to pluralize it then an adverb doesn’t seem to work. “The native anglophones” would be fine too.
whether Queerbaiting would be separable when conjugated.
Jerry avoids gerunds. Here are nouns that can be verbed if you want. I wouldn’t bother to want.
Schwulenhatz for the sense of harassment, provocation.
Schwulenköder for “the incorporation of apparently gay characters or same-sex relationships into a film, television show, etc. as a means of appealing to gay and bisexual audiences while maintaining ambiguity about the characters’ sexuality.”
He gives the following examples for “whether Queerbaiting would be separable when conjugated”:
• Du baitest queer.
• Sie baitet queer.
• Niemand hat die Absicht, queerzubaiten.
• O Harry Styles, bitte, baite mich nicht queer!
Queerzubaiten is so bad.
I’m intrigued by the avoidance of notgelandet, in part I think because the parallel to that possibly-flotsamed adjective notgedrungen feels close to the surface of the later learner’s skin. (I also wonder if a learner’s intuition/overheard guidance about stressed syllables being separable is overriding a more native reluctance to treat queer in the same way as the more usual separability suspects.)
I noticed ‘the natively anglophones’ too – I quite like it (reading ‘natively’ an the adjective before plural ‘anglophones’), but it doesn’t seem quite right! I suspect it originally said ‘the natively anglophone’, and someone who thought ‘anglophone’ must be a noun ‘corrected’ it.
In a small German town I ran across a “homecoming” celebration for the local team that played American football (many German towns have such teams). The parade included young costumed baton-twirling “Cheerleaderinnen.” That’s now my favorite German feminine plural noun.
During lockdown, the practice of working from home got dubbed das Homeoffice, much to the bafflement of Berlin’s UK contingent.
Either the author exaggerates the bafflement of the UK expats, or they’re cut off from linguistic developments back home; I’ve seen home-office (with or without hyphen) being used plenty for the practice of working from home in British publications during the last couple of years.
https://www.collinsdictionary.com/submission/23034/home+office
Does not seem to be a dictionary word yet, but it is certainly recognised. Maybe the expats say “working from home (or remotely)”, which is the more common way of describing the action. A home office would really be an enclosed, dedicated space with a separate phone line, although probably this has already been extended to a less rigid and more conceptual space.
@Paddy: my point was not so much whether home office is the most usual way to refer to working from home or what expression the expats prefer to use, but incredulity that any expat who kept up with media on the blessed isles would be baffled and could only think of the institution Home Office when hearing that expression used by Germans.
Phone line? What is this magic of which you speak, speech transmission without using the radio spectrum? I’m running the house (and my phone) on 5G mobile data, we only have physical cable for TV because it’s included in the rent. (I’m self-employed and for tax reasons it does not make sense to let my company pay for phone or Internet, so it’s all the same net. On the same token, I don’t maintain a dedicated office space).
I have a dedicated space, which is useful as it enables me to deduct a (small) share of the running costs of my home from taxes. But I use my private cable connection (internet, TV, landline – mobile coverage is still 4G where I live) for work communications. Still counts as home office for the taxman.
On bad days, I worry that English has turned primarily into a status symbol — a tool of pure Habitus, a means for young elites to signify their cosmopolitanism and savviness
I don’t know why he worries that this is the case. It is certainly the case, and the reason many of us find certain Anglizismen so annoying. “Game changer” may be annoying because it’s professional jargon but it arguably has no easy equivalent in German. But I hear the Austrian management consultant and marketing class constantly using English words like “Let’s see”, “happy”, “maybe”, “actually”, “alright then” which, to me, just signify someone has been in too many English language business meetings, or maybe just watched a lot of Netflix.
“Agree” in the sense of “sich gegenseitig und freiwillig verpflichten und einen entsprechenden Text ins Protokoll schreiben” seems also to have no simple German equivalent.
Tweak the intonation: what do you think of “the natively-anglo–phones”?
The problem there is, in theory at least, that schwul only applies to mlm, far less than the range “queer” has today, or even “gay” for many people.
…Oh, I misframed the issue somehow. Notgelandet is fine, and common. (Possibly more common nowadays than the rather literary notgedrungen.) What I was trying to talk about is that the verb can’t be conjugated: *wir landen not and *wir notlanden are both wrong, you have to resort to things like wir machen eine Notlandung.
(Or the most dread wir tun notlanden.)
Either the author exaggerates the bafflement of the UK expats, or they’re cut off from linguistic developments back home
The latter. Having been an expat, I am well aware of how one loses touch with the mother country.
Home office for a space in your home where you work (whole room or not), fine. But ‘home office’ as a name for the PRACTICE of working for home does feel odd – I think ‘bafflement’ in this case is more uncanny valley unease than complete incomprehension.
@Hat Having been an expat, I am well aware of how one loses touch with the mother country.
Seconded. Although I still have plenty of family back in Blighty, and watch news and entertainment shows, I’ll readily admit to bafflement at both what’s happening, and the language used to frame it.
(I’m also baffled why so many refugees still try to head there. Aren’t they passing through much more amenable places en route?)
@Jen: okay, maybe it’s that.
@LH, AntC: Having been an expat myself for long periods, I can understand losing touch with popular culture as expressed in TV shows or pop music – the kind of thing one normally registers through osmosis, even if one is not specifically interested in them. I have a harder time comprehending losing touch with language use in these times where the internet makes it so easy to follow news sources and debates back home*). But probably that’s also a question of how much you want to keep in touch.
*) There definitely is a difference between how much I felt cut off from goings-on in Germany when I lived in Central Asia in the 90s, when and where the internet barely existed, and my stays abroad in the last decade.
Also interesting is that while a few people picked up on “the natively anglophones” as awkward, I might have used “natively anglophonic” which is also awkward.
But nobody picked up on “false friends” which in context means incorrect friends and not the way its usually taken as people who only pretend to be friends.
I’m not sure what you mean; “false friends” is simply an anglicized version of the usual “faux amis,” which means foreign words mistakenly taken to mean the same as the native words they resemble — exactly the sense here.
I agree about losing contact with the home culture as an expat.
You also never quite see it in the same way again, after you’ve been long enough away. In fact, “reverse culture shock” can be every bit as disorientating as culture shock, especially if (like me) you hadn’t really anticipated it.
Though probably the major cause of ongoing dissociation from Western ambient culture in my case is the fact that, having not watched any television at all for years, I have never seen any reason to start again. However, as the Young People seem not to watch television either these days, perhaps I’ve finally caught up with the Zeitgeist.
perhaps I’ve finally caught up with the Zeitgeist
If you spend half your day watching cat videos and K-Pop dance routines on Tiktok, the answer is yes.
“The natively anglophones” pulled out of context doesn’t work at all for me, yet, in context, it’s fine, and I hadn’t noticed it. I think I read it as something like “those who are natively anglophones”, which I guess taking it that way only works (for me) when I expect there to be a verb coming.
I have a harder time comprehending losing touch with language use in these times where the internet makes it so easy to follow news sources and debates back home
It is probably very easy for someone from Azerbaijan living in the US to completely lose touch. An American living in Berlin generally has the opposite problem. In 2023 it is impossible to avoid the constant barrage of American cultural product and US related news stories even if you spend 100% of your time hanging out with local Berliners.
But you’re still not going to be as exposed to new linguistic developments as you would be if you were immersed in them living in the home country.
Well, I have been gone for 12 years, I have not noticed any surprises, nor do I ever feel any sense of being a fish out of water when I am in the US. Granted I spend at least 4 weeks a year in the US and work with Americans fairly often, but that is fairly typical of the modern American expat experience (at least in Europe and East Asia). It is very, very different from what I experienced living in Russia in the early 1990s. My 15 year old, who has spent his entire conscious life in Austria, also speaks completely current colloquial American jargon – thanks to TikTok, YouTube, online gaming interactions with Americans, and television (the latter probably significantly less important).
My son is certainly more exposed to new linguistic developments in the US than, say, my 80 year old mother who lives in rural New Hampshire, watches PBS and interacts mostly with her peers.
Good points all.
At least in Linz “to trash” seems to mean “to recycle biological waste”.
Well, yes. The association of -er with the masculine really is that strong. See also: der Computer.
In my mind Austria is fundamentally an “eastern” culture, with regards to Europe. The hub of Eastern Europe, in a way. In the mid-19th century Austria was synonymous with Europe on the Balkans.
Spend some time in Romania and Austria won’t seem very eastern. The beauty of Austria is that it really does combine elements of Italy, the Balkans and Germany in one little package. (Some days it feels like the best elements and other days the worst). As an outsider I feel like Sovenia, Austria and Czechia form their own distinct cultural area. That’s hardly surprising given their history, the surprising thing is that the inhabitants of those countries often don’t seem to recognize their shared culture.
Not many Austrians have actually been to Slovakia or Slovenia.
Anyway, you’d think the commonalities are all carried on from 1918 or earlier, but no: an ATM is called Bankomat in Austria, Czechia and Poland*, but Geldautomat in Germany.
* Final stress in German, initial in Czech, penultimate in Polish…
Not many Austrians have actually been to Slovakia or Slovenia
I would guess that a significant majority of Austrians have been to Slovenia, at least in the sense of “drove through Slovenia on the way to Croatia, or maybe Jesolo”
(Ljubljana is a charming compact city btw, if anyone is looking for a slightly less touristy Wes Anderson-style European experience )