Englischer Sprachkontakt in den Varietäten des Deutschen - English in Contact with Varieties of German 3631581327, 9783631581322

Table of contents :
Falco Pfalzgraf: Vorwort

Sylvia Jaworska: Where Have All the Linguists Gone? The Position of Linguistics in British German Studies from the mid-19th Century until 2000

Anthony Stanforth: The Influence of High German on the English Language

Alexander Onysko: Divergence with a cause? The systemic integration of anglicisms in German as an indication of the intensity of language contact

David Yeandle: English Loan Words and their Gender in German. An Etymological Perspective

Kerstin Paul & Eva Wittenberg: „Aşkım, Baby, Schatz …“ Anglizismen in einer multiethnischen Jugendsprache

Rudolf Muhr: Anglizismen und Pseudoanglizismen im Österreichischen Deutsch: 1945–2008. Ein Bericht

Felicity Rash: „Englisch ist cool“: The Influence of English on Swiss German

Gerald Newton: The English Influence on Luxembourgish

Falco Pfalzgraf: Sprachpurismus und Globalisierung

Melani Schröter: Der Thatcher-Merkel-Vergleich in der britischen und deutschen Presse 2005

Citation preview

5

Inhalt Danksagung

7

Falco Pfalzgraf: Vorwort

9

Sylvia Jaworska: Where Have All the Linguists Gone? The Position of Linguistics in British German Studies from the mid19th Century until 2000 Anthony Stanforth: The Influence of High German on the English Language Alexander Onysko: Divergence with a cause? The systemic integration of anglicisms in German as an indication of the intensity of language contact

13

35 53

David Yeandle: English Loan Words and their Gender in German. An Etymological Perspective

75

Kerstin Paul & Eva Wittenberg: „Aşkım, Baby, Schatz …“ Anglizismen in einer multiethnischen Jugendsprache

95

Rudolf Muhr: Anglizismen und Pseudoanglizismen im Österreichischen Deutsch: 1945–2008. Ein Bericht

123

Felicity Rash: „Englisch ist cool“: The Influence of English on Swiss German

171

Gerald Newton: The English Influence on Luxembourgish

185

Falco Pfalzgraf: Sprachpurismus und Globalisierung

215

Melani Schröter: Der Thatcher-Merkel-Vergleich in der britischen und deutschen Presse 2005

227

6

7

Danksagung Meinen größten Dank schulde ich Herrn Prof. Dr. Rüdiger Görner, Head of the School of Languages, Linguistics and Film und Direktor des Centre for Anglo-German Cultural Relations (CAGCR) am Queen Mary College der University of London. Seine Gründung des Zentrums hat diesen Band überhaupt erst möglich gemacht. Zudem hat Prof. Görner auch stets meine Aktivitäten in meiner Rolle als Leiter der Sektion Language & Linguistics des CAGCR unterstützt und gefördert. Gedankt sei auch allen anderen Mitarbeiterinnen und Mitarbeitern des CAGCR, vor allem aber dem stellvertretenden Direktor Dr. Angus Nicholls, für die Hilfe und Unterstützung bei der Organisation der Vorträge, auf denen dieser Band gründet. Weiterhin sei Frau Prof. Dr. Felicity Rash für ihre Hilfe bei der editoriellen Bearbeitung besonders der englischsprachigen Beiträge dieses Bandes gedankt. Herzlich danken möchte ich Herrn Ass.-Prof. Mag. Dr. phil. Rudolf Muhr, Forschungsstelle Österreichisches Deutsch, Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz, für seine große Hilfe bei der Veröffentlichung dieses Bandes. In diesem Zusammenhang sei auch ganz besonders dem österreichischem Bundesministerium für Wissenschaft und Forschung für die Finanzierung dieser Publikation gedankt.

Falco Pfalzgraf

8

In: Falco Pfalzgraf (Hg.) (2008): Englischer Sprachkontakt in den Varietäten des Deutschen / English in Contact with Varieties of German. Wien, Frankfurt a. M. u.a. Peter Lang Verlag. S. 9–12.

Vorwort Dieser Band enthält eine Auswahl von zehn Aufsätzen, welche auf Vorträgen basieren, die seit Herbst 2006 in der Sektion Language & Linguistics des Centre for Anglo-German Linguistic Relations (CAGCR) bzw. auf vom Centre ausgerichteten Veranstaltungen gehalten wurden. 1 Das am Queen Mary College der University of London ansässige CAGCR wurde am ersten Dezember 2005 von Thomas Matussek, seinerzeit Botschafter der Bundesrepublik Deutschland in London, eingeweiht. 2 Gründer und Direktor des Centre ist Professor Rüdiger Görner, derzeit Head of the School of Languages, Linguistics and Film, ebenfalls Queen Mary, University of London. Schon kurz nach der Gründung des CAGCR, nämlich in den ersten beiden Jahren, kam der Sektion Language & Linguistics eine bedeutende Rolle zu, wurde unser Sachgebiet doch 2006/07 zur „focus area“ 3 und 2007/08 zur „Principal Area of Research“ 4 erklärt. Die beiden Kernpunkte der bisherigen Arbeit der Sektion Language & Linguistics sind eine Vortragsreihe, die sich nicht nur an das linguistische Fachpublikum richtete, sondern auch Studierende und Besucher von außerhalb der Universität mit einbezog, sowie die im November 2007 stattgefundene internationale Konferenz „Anglo-German Linguistic Relations“, 5 mit Vortragenden aus sieben Ländern und von drei Kontinenten. Einige ausgewählte Ergebnisse beider Veranstaltungen finden sich in diesem und einem weiteren Sammelband. 6 Bei den Planungen zur Gründung des CAGCR wurden sprachliche Fragen bzw. die Sprachwissenschaft zunächst außen vor gelassen; Literatur, Drama und Philosophie standen zunächst gedanklich im Vordergrund. Erst im Verlauf des Aufbaus des Centre setzten meine Kollegin Prof. Felicity Rash und ich uns gemeinsam für eine sprachwissenschaftlich orientierte Sektion 1

Vgl. "Language and Linguistics in the CAGCR". (17. Dezember 2008).

2

Vgl. "Centre for Anglo-German Cultural Relations". (17. Dezember 2008).

3

Vgl. Centre for Anglo-German Cultural Relations: Annual Report 2006/07, S. 3. Online Verfügbar unter (17. Dezember 2008).

4

Vgl. Centre for Anglo-German Cultural Relations: Annual Report 2007/08, S. 3. Online Verfügbar unter (17. Dezember 2008).

5

Vgl. "Anglo-German Linguistic Relations". (17. Dezember 2008).

6

Pfalzgraf, Falco / Rash, Felicity (Hg.) (2008): Anglo-German Linguistic Relations (Jahrbuch für Internationale Germanistik. Reihe A. Band 98). Frankfurt am Main. Lang.

10

Falco Pfalzgraf

ein. Gründer und Direktor Prof. Rüdiger Görner stimmte sofort freudig zu und hat die Sektion — und vor allem auch mich als Sektionsleiter — seitdem immer sehr unterstützt und gefördert. Mögliche Gründe dafür, dass an die Sprachwissenschaft beim Aufbau eines Zentrums für englisch-deutsche Kulturbeziehungen zunächst nicht gedacht wurde, finden sich in dem kritischen Beitrag „Where have all the linguists gone? The Position of Linguistics in British German Studies in British German Studies from the mid-19th Century until 2000“ von Sylvia Jaworska (Queen Mary, University of London). Englisch-deutsche Kulturbeziehungen spiegeln sich natürlich in beiden Sprachen und in Diskussionen über selbige wieder; gelegentlich kommt es gar zu einer — aus linguistischer Sicht abzulehnenden — Gleichsetzung von Sprache und Kultur. Die öffentliche Diskussion findet dann — oft in hoch emotionalisierter Weise — in den Medien statt: „Rettet dem Deutsch! — Die Verlotterung der Sprache“ titelte Der Spiegel im Oktober 2006, 7 und „Die verkaufte Sprache“ beklagte Jens Jessen im Juli 2007 in der Zeit. 8 Regelmäßig finden sich solche oder ähnliche Meldungen in der deutschen Presse, in denen sich die Autoren neben verschiedensten anderen sprachlichen Phänomenen auch immer wieder über englische Spracheinflüsse auf das Deutsche schreiben — meist ablehnend. Und dank der Initiative ‚Deutsch ins Grundgesetz‘ des CDU-Parteitags hat das Thema inzwischen sogar die englische Presse erreicht. 9 Mit Fragen, die mit Diskussionen dieser Art eng zusammenhängen, beschäftigen sich die weiteren Beiträge dieses Bandes. Nach dem bereits erwähnten überleitend-kritischen Beitrag von Sylvia Jaworska gibt Anthony Stanforth, Emeritus Professor und ehemals Chair of Modern Languages an der Heriot-Watt University, einen hervorragenden Überblick über die Einflüsse des Hochdeutschen auf die englische Sprache. Ihm folgt Alexander Onysko, Dozent am Institut für Anglistik der Universität Innsbruck, der in seinen Ausführungen zur systematischen Integration von Anglizismen im deutschen als Indikator für die Intensität von Sprachkontakt auf die Frage eingeht, ob die kürzlich zugenommene Zahl der Anglizis-

7

Schreiber, Mathias. "Rettet dem Deutsch! — Die Verlotterung der Sprache". In: Der Spiegel 40/2006 (02.10.2006), S. 182–198.

8

Jessen, Jens. "Die verkaufte Sprache". In: Die Zeit 31/2007 (26.07.2007), S. 41.

9

Paterson, Tony. "Sprechen Sie Deutsch?". In: The Independent (16.12.2008), S. 25.

Vorwort

11

men im deutschen eine Gefahr für die Sprache darstellt — eine in den Medien immer wieder kolportierte Annahme. Mit der ebenfalls in der Öffentlichkeit immer wieder diskutierten Frage, wie englische Lehnwörter im Deutschen ihr grammatisches Geschlecht erhalten, setzt sich David Yeandle, Professor für Deutsch am King’s College London, auseinander. Yeandles etymologischer Ansatz kommt dabei zu bemerkenswerten Ergebnissen. Eva Wittenberg und Kerstin Paul, beide Doktorandinnen am Institut für Germanistik der Universität Potsdam, beschäftigen sich im mit dem inzwischen jedem aus den Medien bekannten Phänomen des ‚Kiezdeutsch‘ und der Frage, welche Rolle Anglizismen in dieser multiethnischen Jugendsprache spielen. Ass.-Prof. Mag. Dr. phil. Rudolf Muhr von der Forschungsstelle Österreichisches Deutsch an der Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz gibt sodann einen umfassenden Überblick über Forschungen zu englischsprachigen Einflüssen auf das Österreichische Deutsch, der den Zeitraum 1945–2008 und damit über 60 Jahre abdeckt. Ebenfalls weist Muhr auf immer wiederkehrende Probleme, die bei der Definition und Zählung von Anglizismen auftreten, hin. Felicity Rash, Professorin für Germanistische Linguistik am Queen Mary College der University of London, gibt sodann einen Überblick über englischsprachige Einflüsse auf das Deutsch der Schweiz, wobei sie vor allem auch auf die Reaktionen der Sprecher auf solche Einflüsse eingeht. Zwar ist das Luxemburgische keine Variante des Deutschen im engeren Sinn; jedoch hoffte die Sektion Language & Linguistics, auch diese Sprache repräsentiert sehen zu können. Gerald Newton, Professor für Deutsch an der Sheffield University und Direktor des University of Sheffield Centre for Luxembourg Studies, präsentiert hier einen umfassenden Überblick über englischsprachige Einflüsse auf das Luxemburgische, ihre Herkunft und ihre Häufigkeit. Falco Pfalzgraf, Dozent für germanistische Linguistik und Mittelalterliches Deutsch am Queen Mary College der University of London, stellt in seinem Beitrag die Frage, inwiefern ein Zusammenhang zwischen der von ihm als ‚Neopurismus‘ bezeichneten Bewegung und dem Phänomen der Globali-

12

Falco Pfalzgraf

sierung bestehen könnte. Pfalzgraf zeigt Wege auf, wie diese Frage geklärt werden kann. Abschließend befasst sich Melani Schröter, Dozentin für Deutsch an der University of Reading, mit dem Thatcher-Merkel-Vergleich in der britischen und deutschen Presse im Jahr 2005. Die Ergebnisse dieses Vergleichs lassen u.a. ein wenig tiefer in die Verfasstheit des medialen britisch-deutschen Diskurses über die Bundestagswahl 2005 blicken. Besonders freut mich als Herausgeber, dass es mit diesem Band gelungen ist, eine große Breite an Beitragenden versammeln zu können, von Doktorandinnen bis hin zu ausgezeichneten Spezialist(inn)en ihres jeweiligen Forschungsgebietes. Ich hoffe, mit den gesammelten Aufsätzen einen kleinen Beitrag zur Analyse und Darstellung der englisch-deutschen Kultur- und Sprachbeziehungen zu leisten — und auch zu weiteren Arbeiten auf diesem Gebiet anregen zu können. Falco Pfalzgraf

In: Falco Pfalzgraf (Hg.) (2008): Englischer Sprachkontakt in den Varietäten des Deutschen / English in Contact with Varieties of German. Wien, Frankfurt a. M. u.a. Peter Lang Verlag. S. 13– 33.

Sylvia Jaworska (Queen Mary University of London/UK, Department of German/SLLF) [email protected]

Where Have All the Linguists Gone? The Position of Linguistics in British German Studies from the mid-19th Century until 2000 Abstract Retrospectively, Linguistics — understood as the scientific study of language — has been an important part of British German Studies. In fact, the establishment of modern language as academic disciplines in the United Kingdom is closely related to that of Germanic philology and the interest in the history, and structure of languages. However, over the last few decades, a demise of Linguistics in departments of modern languages has been observed. The aim of this paper is to survey the position of linguistic research and teaching in the discipline of German Studies in the UK. To begin with, I will give a brief account of the history of linguistic and language studies in the discipline. Subsequently, the current position of Linguistics in research and teaching will be scrutinized. Finally, this paper will discuss the importance of linguistic insights for the discipline of German Studies, with particular reference to teaching.

1. Introduction In 2000, Anthony Lodge argued that one of the major changes in the departments of Modern Languages in British Higher Education over the last few decades has been a steady retreat of Linguistics from the curriculum and research. To support his argument, he states, for example, that in French Studies only half a dozen of approximately 150 professors specialize in Linguistics and no more than one in fifteen postgraduate students embarks on research projects directly related to language (ibid.: 113). This scenario points to the rather minor status of Linguistics in French Studies and ultimately raises the question whether such a trend is reflected in departments of other modern languages. It would indeed be a paradox, if Linguistics were to diminish from the departments which originated from the interest in language(s) sensu stricto, and which are distinguished from other academic de-

14

Sylvia Jaworska

partments by specific reference to the language. 1 Thus, this paper will survey the position of Linguistics in teaching and research conducted in the departments of German Studies in Britain. I will first provide a brief, historical account of linguistic / language interests in the discipline of German Studies. Subsequently, the current position of linguistic research and teaching will be scrutinized and compared with other subject areas present in the departments. I will do so by looking at the research and teaching profiles, including publications in Germanic research and PhD-theses. The main sources are publicity materials and departmental prospectuses available online as well as publications lists “Research in Germanic Studies” from 1995–2000 compiled by the Institute of German Studies and the Conference of University Teachers of German in Great Britain and Ireland (CUTG). Finally, this paper will discuss the importance of linguistic insights for the discipline of modern languages focusing on teaching German as a Foreign Language (DaF). Before embarking on the main tasks of this paper, I would like to establish terminological clarity about the two disciplines in question: German Studies and Linguistics. The term German Studies, when used here, denotes a discipline which is principally dedicated to research and promotion of the German language and culture outside German-speaking communities. In the German academic context, the term Auslandsgermanistik is frequently used when referring to the departments and institutes of German Studies abroad. These are contrasted with Inlandsgermanistik, i.e. the Germanistik in German-speaking countries. There has recently been an intense debate about the validity of this terminological division, which, as some argue, implies a superiority of the Inlandsgermanistik (see for example Fandrych 2006, Sitta 2004). Without going into detail about the individual arguments, German Studies are understood here as an autonomous discipline grown out of and influenced by specific linguistic, cultural, social, political and educational conditions of a local context, in this case Britain. The positioning of the discipline concerned with German language and culture, in another linguistic and cultural community ultimately implies that it is, by its very nature, a contrastive, bilingual and increasingly a multilingual practice (Fandrych 2006).

1

In Britain, the establishment of modern languages as academic subjects is closely related to the philological interest in the origin of languages. One of the very first chairs of Modern Languages at Oxford was held by the renowned scholar of Indo-European languages Friedrich Max Müller (Batts 1999).

Where Have All the Linguists Gone?

15

Following Crystal (1986, 2003), Linguistics is understood as the scientific study of language. Over the past few decades, the interest in linguistic studies has expanded rapidly, leading to the establishment of diverse branches of linguistic research. To provide an overview of these branches goes well beyond the scope of this paper, but broadly speaking, there are two main dimensions which are frequently distinguished in the research literature: the theoretical and the applied. The former is primarily concerned with language in itself. It focuses on the description of the facts of a specific language from a synchronic and diachronic perspective and on principles governing language as a human faculty (Crystal 2003). The latter dimension has been rather problematic to define. Originally, Applied Linguistics (AL) was understood as a discipline responsible for the application of linguistic descriptions to the production of grammars and teaching materials (Meara 2004). Thus, perhaps better described as Linguistics Applied, it was strongly associated with the acquisition and teaching of foreign languages. From the 1960s onwards, AL grew rapidly to become a discipline of a distinct, inter-disciplinary nature. 2 The definition of AL often quoted is the one proposed by Brumfit (1997: 93), who conceives that the main aim of this discipline is “the theoretical and empirical investigation of real-world problems in which language is a central issue”. This is a rather broad conceptualization which does not stipulate how the applied dimension differs from the theoretical one. Besides, the stress on the real-world problems which occurs in nearly all the definitions of AL is not without its difficulties. Davies and Elder (2004: 4) highlight that “once language use is focused on for study and analysis it ceases to exit in the real world.” For the purpose of this paper, I will draw on the definitions suggested by Davies and Elder (ibid.). The authors attempt to strike a balance between the very narrow and the very broad conceptualizations of AL by defining it as an independent discipline which “seeks to marry practical experience and theoretical understanding of language development and language in use” (ibid.: 11). In contrast to General Linguistics, which is primarily concerned with language in itself, AL focuses on language problems “for what they reveal about the role of language in people’s daily lives”. Davies and Elder (ibid.) emphasize that the boundaries between Linguistics and AL cannot and should not be strictly delimited. 2

The prominent academic publishing house Mouton de Gruyter lists 16 areas under the headline of Applied Linguistics. These include: Sociolinguistics, Language Contact, Language Planning, Dialectology, Pragmatics, Didactics, Lexicography, Computational Linguistics, Contrastive Linguistics, Corpus Linguistics, Textlinguistics, Discourse Analysis, Rhetoric, Language Policy and Onomastics.

16

Sylvia Jaworska

2. Linguistics in British Germanistik — a tradition of applied language studies? Formal research on the German language in England is directly coupled with the developments of German as an academic discipline that date back to the first half of the 19th century. However, it would convey a wrong impression to suggest that there was no interest in the description and analysis of German before this time. The first German Grammar — the HighDutch Minerva a la Mode by Martin Aedler — was published in 1680. 3 Aedler’s publication was followed by Henry Offelen’s Double Grammar for Germans to learn English and for Englishmen to learn German issued in 1687. The 18th century witnessed a number of books concerned with the structure of the German language including John King’s English and High German Grammar (1715) and The True Guide to the German Language published anonymously in 1758 (Ortmanns 1993). Those early German grammar books had a clear applied purpose (cf. Hüllen 2004). They were written as schoolbooks for a small group of nobles, army officers and traders — the main British clientele interested in German at that time (Ortmanns 1993). The development of research and teaching with a linguistic focus commenced in the first decades of the 19th century with the establishment of German as an academic subject in English universities. The beginnings were difficult, not least because of the supremacy enjoyed by the departments of Classics. The study of classical languages was perceived as a true intellectual endeavour, while modern languages were considered too trivial to be worth intellectual scrutiny (cf. Ortmanns 1993, Sagarra 1998, 1999). They were seen, at best, as “bread and butter” studies for intellectually weak pupils who struggled with Latin and Greek (Brereton 1905). Despite such constraints, the first Germanists were highly productive scholars. They produced a breadth of annotated texts, anthologies, published lectures and translations. An interesting fact is that many of them were dedicated to language studies and saw their application as important. A number of their publications would today appear under the heading of Applied Linguistics. I will give a few examples to illustrate this point.

3

An in-depth study of this first grammar of German in England and its author, nota bene a member of the Baroque linguistic society Teutschgesinnte Genossenschaft, is offered by van der Lubbe (2007).

Where Have All the Linguists Gone?

17

Adolphus Bernays (1794–1864) was the first professor of German Language and Literature at King’s College, University of London (Flood 1999). Bernays had mainly literary interests — he is famous for the German Poetical Anthology (1829). At the same time, he did not shy away from contemporary linguistic concepts that were circulated in philological circles in Germany in the first half of the 19th century. In 1830, he published a Compendious Ger-

man Grammar with a dictionary of the principal prefixes & affixes alphabetically arranged according to the recent investigations of J. Grimm, and other distinguished grammarians. In contrast to Aedler’s grammar which forced the author into bankruptcy, Bernays’ book proved to be successful and in 1855 reached its 9th edition. His interest in comparative language studies resulted in the later publication German Word-Book: a comparative vocabulary dis-

playing the close affinity between the German and the English languages (1852). Throughout his career, Bernays was dedicated to the improvement of teaching and learning German and many of his suggestions would today still be considered as valuable. He advocated a comparative and thorough study of grammar and word formation. He was convinced that the structure of German words leads to reflection; and through its careful analysis, one would be able to better understand the German mind. Another great, although not well known, example is Karl Hermann Breul (1860–1932), who was appointed the first University Lecturer in German at Cambridge University in 1884. 4 Made a University Reader in Germanic in 1899, he would become the first Schröder Professor in 1910 — a chair endowed by the wealthy London banker of German origin, Baron Johann Heinrich von Schröder. Karl Breul obtained his PhD from the University of Berlin, where he studied under renowned philologists such as Wilhelm Scherer, Karl Müllenhof and Julius Zupitza. It was the philological, scientific (wissenschaftlich) tradition based on a systematic study of language and literature that Breul set to promote in the discipline of modern languages in Britain. His work focused in great measure on the history of linguistic and literary relations between England and Germany. At the same time, he was a man who had both feet firmly on the ground and endeavoured to respond to the acute needs of his discipline in Britain. When Breul arrived in Cambridge 4

There is a brief mention of Karl Breul in the paper by Husbands (2007), who misleadingly describes him as a famous lexicographer. In fact, Karl Breul was a specialist in medieval comparative literature. His first book was dedicated to the old English epic “Sir Gowther” and the legend of “Robert le Diable”. He also had an interest in lexicography. Later in his life, he completed a new edition of the Cassell’s German Dictionary (1909c).

18

Sylvia Jaworska

in 1884, the Medieval and Modern Languages Tripos had been just introduced (Breul 1909a). That it did not attract many students was probably due its heavy load of medieval components and absence of “the modern and oral element” (ibid.: 4). He set himself the aim of modernizing the teaching of German by combining a systematic philological study with new linguistic concepts that were gaining grounds at that time. The new science of Phonetics and the work of the phonetician Wilhelm Viëtor impressed him in particular. 5 Under Breul’s headship, training in phonetics and phonology of both German and English as well as oral classes became part of the Cambridge curriculum (Breul 1909b). This in turn fired enthusiasm for the sounds of languages among his students, particularly Walter Rippmann (1869–1947), who later became a Professor of German and a co-founder of the new spelling of English (Flood 2001). 6 Alongside his reformatory zeal and appreciation of spoken language, Breul demonstrated “Sprachnormenfrömmigkeit” (von Polenz 1988), concerning language and language teaching, i.e. strong normative views underpinned by some folk-linguistic attitudes. 7 Although he saw some value in learning about the sound differences in the major German dialects, for teaching purpose, only the sophisticated German speech of north Germany was to be used. He particularly recommended the pronunciation “of refined Berlin ladies, who will never be heard to say Jenuβ , jicklich, or Bealina (= Berliner), Brandenbuaja (= Branderburger)” (Breul 1909b: 67). The Hanoverian pronunciation was, in his view, excellent in many ways (he was Hanoverian himself!), however not free from provincialisms and therefore not recommended. He warned strongly against the use of the Saxon accent “the defects of which are especially marked” (ibid.). 8 It took nearly 100 5

Wilhelm Viëtor is probably best known as the author of the pamphlet: “Der Sprachunterricht muss umkehren”, published in 1882, which much inspired the science of Phonetics. In 1882, Viëtor accepted a lectureship at University College in Liverpool. He was in England when he wrote the famous pamphlet and it was Henry Sweet himself who helped it top a wide circulation by endorsing it in one of his papers (Howatt 1982).

6

Walter Rippmann published numerous books and teaching materials on the phonetics of English, French and German. His sound charts were recommended by Karl Breul for teaching modern languages in schools. Rippmann was a member of the Simplified Spelling Society and compiled the Society’s Dictionary of New Spelling (Flood 2001).

7

The role that teachers play in the establishment of the standard varieties is discussed by Davies (2000).

8

As many other British Germanists, Karl Breul was a member of the London Branch of the Allgemeiner Deutscher Sprachverein (Flood 2001). However, he presented a rather moderate puristic stance, as for example he used a number of French words in his writings. However, Breul was certainly concerned with the influence of English on the German of migrants to England and attempted to analyse it systematically, as his essay “Das Deutsche im Munde der Deutschen im Auslande” (Breul 1904) demonstrates. He maintained that teachers and lecturers were responsible for the preservation of German; it was their “heilige pflicht, unsre teure muttersprache möglichst rein und schön zu sprechen und vor beeinflussung durch fremde redeweise in ausdruck und satzbau nach kräften zu bewahren” (Breul 1904: 458, the original spelling of the publication is preserved here).

Where Have All the Linguists Gone?

19

years to raise the issue of standard German and its varieties in relation to language teaching in the context of British Germanistik (Durrell 2003, 2004). There were many other Germanist pioneers who laid foundations for linguistic studies and language teaching in British Germanistik. Robert Priebsch (1866–1935), a distinguished medievalist, together with his pupil William Collinson published The German Language (6th edition in 1966), which remained “the Bible of the undergraduates until the day that Rudolf Keller […] published his magisterial work under the same title” (Sagarra 1998: 521). This picture would not be completed without mentioning Hermann Georg Fiedler (1862–1945) and Francis Sandbach (1874–1946). The former was a professor of German Language and Literature at Oxford, the latter at the University of Birmingham. Together, they published two works on what these days would be described as ‘Deutsch als Wissenschaftsprache’: A First German Course for Science Students (1906a) and A Second German Course

for Science Students: Readings from Recent German Scientific Publications (1906b). Finally, a small contribution to lexicography was made by Karl Wichmann (1868–1948), a professor of German at Birmingham, who published a Pocket Dictionary of the English and German Languages (1932). It was reprinted many times and widely used beyond Britain (Husbands 2007). His own, so promising academic career ended abruptly at the eve of the First World War. Wichmann, as many other German academics, became a victim of anti-German propaganda and was removed from his chair (ibid.). The first generation Germanists were philologists, who in true Humboldian spirit endeavoured to understand cultural evolvement through language and combined both literary studies with a systematic analysis of language(s). They played a crucial role in the establishment of modern languages in Britain and have since had a substantial impact on other philologies, including French and English Studies. 9 The first generation Germanists were also very concerned with the improvement of teaching and learning of German 9

The development of modern languages as university subjects in the UK is closely linked with philological research and teaching carried out in Germany in the second half of the 19th century. There were rich mutual exchanges, which have not been well explored to date. One of the most prominent scholars to exemplify this interconnection, is the first Merton Professor of English Language and Literature at Oxford, Arthur Napier (1853–1916). He was a qualified chemist but attended lectures given by Friedrich Max Müller. These inspired him to go to Berlin, where he studied under Wilhelm Scherer, Karl Müllenhof and Julius Zupitza. Other examples include the famous etymologist Walter William Skeat or the first lecturer in French Language and Literature at Cambridge Eugene Braunholtz.

20

Sylvia Jaworska

and for these purposes, produced an extensive range of books and teaching materials covering grammar, translations, academic reading and writing, pronunciation, spoken German, etc. These materials were based on systematic linguistic descriptions and were adapted to the specific needs of British students of German. They vastly enhanced the quality of teaching in the departments and in doing so, sparked more interest in German literature, culture and philosophy (Batts 1999, Ortmanns 1993). 10 The 1920s and 1930s mark a paradigm shift in the development of British Germanistik, which had a serious impact on language studies (Sagarra 1999). The dominance of Philology in modern language curricula was heavily criticized. 11 Gradually, the philological components were reduced and the analysis of modern literature, beyond the canon of the 19th century expanded. Undoubtedly, this development was refreshing and stimulating for the discipline as a whole but had some undesirable effects on language studies. While the field of literary research was growing at great speed, language studies were slowly sidelined. This all happened at the time when Linguistics itself started to expand rapidly. The pioneering work by Ferdinand de Saussure and Leonard Bloomfield initiated new methods of linguistic analysis and contributed to the study of syntax and semantics. New branches of Linguistics, such sociolinguistics or ethnolinguistics were developed. At that time, the term Applied Linguistics came to be used widely. The 1960s brought the study of transformational-generative grammar, which had an enormous impact on the development of Linguistics. It generated fascination but also criticism. Since the 1960s, the theoretical models proposed by Chomsky and his disciples have been challenged. New concepts of grammar have been proposed and new linguistic paths followed. In fact, Linguistics had grown so fast as a discipline that it is currently virtually impossible to keep up-to-date with the developments. Analytical tools developed by linguists have been widely used beyond the field of Linguistics to examine social, cultural and even political phenomena (Bausinger 1999). Many of these developments have bypassed the departments of Modern Languages in the UK. The ques10 The main stimulus was of course the growing importance of German as a language of culture, science and economy. 11 Sagarra (1998: 514) argues that the profile of the German degree was narrowed down to the study of several dead languages such as Old Norse, Old Icelandic, Old Saxon Old Irish and Gothic. Judging from the programme description provided by Breul (1909) this is not entirely the case. In fact, the curriculum was substantially modified in 1891, which resulted in the philological element being reduced and modern literature side (including study of Bürger, Goethe, Schiller, Uhland, Heine and Fontane) being expanded. Students were also able to choose between the more philologically or more literarily orientated papers.

Where Have All the Linguists Gone?

21

tion which ultimately arises is: Why is this the case? Lodge (2001) argues that from the 1960s onwards, linguists started to see little connection between Theoretical Linguistics and their everyday activities in language departments. Increasingly many who were interested in language settled down in the Departments of Linguistics, which were at that time flourishing in universities in English-speaking countries. Another reason may be a rather negative attitude towards studying languages, which was perceived as a dry training in isolated forms and structures (cf. Durrell 1993). This has been regarded as an obstacle to the development of creativity in the spoken and written word and may have turned some potential students away from Linguistics. If we look at the profile of German Studies from the 1930s until the late 1970s, indeed the position of Linguistics seems, with a few eminent exceptions, rather marginal. According to Sagarra (1998), after the Second World War there were only three German departments which preserved research and teaching in Germanic Linguistics: Oxford, Manchester and Glasgow. One of the few exceptions was the lexicographer Trevor Jones, the Taylor Professor of German at Oxford and later Schröder Professor of German at Cambridge. He could be described as a true applied linguist (cf. Sagarra 1998). Jones’ expertise in Germanic Linguistics proved indispensible during the Second World War. He, together with his other colleagues from Cambridge, was involved in British Intelligence operations at Bletchley Park, where he was responsible for interpreting messages deciphered by the Enigma code-breakers. According to Millward (2001: 21), he got stuck only on rare occasions, with one such instance being the word Drehkreuzscheibe, which was a technical term of a device unknown in Britain at that time. The arrival of the linguist Rudolf Keller at the University of Manchester was a significant step in maintaining and developing the linguistic strand in the British German Studies. His scholarly work, particularly on dialects and spoken German, won him an international reputation. Under his leadership, Manchester became a major centre for research in Germanic Linguistics in the UK and many future British linguists were educated there.12 On the whole, in the post-war period, Linguistics led a shadowy existence in the British German Studies. One of the indicators for this is the fact 12 Anthony Stanforth and Gerald Newton are just some of the other linguists who helped to keep Linguistics in German Studies alive.

22

Sylvia Jaworska

that in the leading organ of the British German Studies German Life and Letters in the period between 1930s and late 1980s, only a dozen articles focused on aspects related to Linguistics. Papers on Linguistics were also scarce in the annually organized Conference of University Teachers of German in Great Britain and Ireland (CUTG). The situation improved considerably during the 1990s. The establishment of the Forum for Germanic Language Studies (FGLS) by Martin Durrell and Anthony Fox in 1994 gave it an impetus. Linguistic research began to develop at many old and new universities: Newcastle, Southampton, Aston, King’s College, Lancaster to name but a few. Alongside the standard linguistic areas such as syntax and morphology, new research strands were developed that sought to explore the connections between language, society, history and ideology. The concepts of discourse, standardization, linguistic variation, purism or cognitive metaphor theory were applied to and explored in a variety of contexts of the German language use. 13 The practical side was emphasized too. Issues discussed were centred on spoken language, grammar teaching and linguistic variation in Deutsch als Fremdsprache (DaF) teaching (Durrell 1993, 2003, 2004, Reershemius 1998, 2001). However, on the whole, this strand has had a rather marginal position.

3. The position of Linguistics in British German Studies — the current picture The following section will give an account of the position of Linguistics in British departments of German Studies. It will do so by looking at research interests of academic staff, publications in Germanic research, including PhD theses and the representation of linguistic areas in the curricula. I have considered universities in England and only those which offer German to the degree level. The number of departments surveyed is thirty-six. The main sources of this survey are publicity materials and prospectuses available online as well as publications listed in Research in Germanic Studies from 1995–2000 compiled by the Institute of German Studies and the Conference of University Teachers of German in Great Britain and Ireland (CUTG).14

13 For studies on standardization, linguistic variations and linguistic contact see e.g. Davies (1995), Barbour and Stevenson (1998), Langer (2001), Reershemius (2004); for work on purism see Langer and Davies (2005), Pfalzgraf (2006), and for studies in Cognitive Linguistics and Discourse Analysis see Musolff (2004), Rash (2007). 14 See the list at , (accessed November 2008).

Where Have All the Linguists Gone?

23

As far as research profiles of academic staff (excluding Lektoren) are concerned, a clear-cut picture emerges. Approximately three quarters of Germanists name an area of literature as their main or only research interest and only approximately twelve per cent could be classified as linguists. The remaining academics conduct research activities in the field of Area Studies, including history, politics, society, media or business environment. In terms of professorships, out of sixty or so professors, nine have their specialism in a field of Linguistics. All in all, one in ten academic staff in German Studies has the investigation of language as his or her main concern. Moreover, it is important to note that nearly fourteen out of thirty-six departments do not have any linguists at all. Some of these departments are very large and prominent. A sign of vitality of a discipline is the number of publications in that discipline including PhD-theses. It is an indicator of prestige and an indispensable source of income for departments (Coleman 2004). It also points towards future developments and where the next generation of researchers and teachers will come from. According to a list of research work published in 1999 and compiled by the CUTG, the field of literary research was the most productive as it produced nearly 500 publications, which amounted to nearly sixty percent of all published work. 15 Academics in the field of Politics, History, Media and Society produced around 260 publications. Linguistic work ranked last with approximately ninety-five publications. Considering the small number of linguists, this is still an impressive result. As far as PhDresearch is concerned, in the period from 1995 to 1999, eight theses in the field of Linguistics were completed. At the same time, there were 151 doctoral theses in Literature and over thirty in Area Studies. Finally, I examined what linguistic fields are prevalent in the departments of German Studies and to what extent Linguistics is represented in the curricula. The survey reveals a variety of subjects and topics investigated by linguists. Historical Linguistics and Sociolinguistics are well represented. There is also a vast research interest in Phonology, Morphology, Syntax, Pragmatics and Discourse Analysis. Five linguists name areas of Applied Linguistics as one of their research interests.

15 Since some of the publications appear in one or two categories, the numbers are rough estimates.

24

Sylvia Jaworska

In terms of curricula, an examination of handbooks available online demonstrates that there is no such a thing as a ‘typical’ programme for German Studies. In fact, every department has created its own unique syllabus strongly bound to the teaching and research expertise of staff. Linguistics is a rather peripheral phenomenon in the curricula. We will find one or maximal two courses dedicated to linguistic areas in twenty out of thirty six universities. These are predominantly generic introductions to German / Germanic Linguistics including aspects of Historical Linguistics, Sociolinguistics and Dialectology. Only three universities offer courses on German phonetics / phonology, and only four have a course dedicated specifically to variation in Germanic languages. The purpose of this section was not to provide precise statistical data but to capture the representation of Linguistics and to position it within British German Studies. Two major conclusions can be derived from what has been demonstrated: Firstly, there has been an expansion in many areas of linguistic research. While previously the main focus was on historical language studies, these days, a much larger diversity of areas is covered including Sociolinguistics, Discourse Analysis, Dialectology, Linguistic Contacts and Variations, Valency, Feminist Linguistics and Corpus Linguistics. Alongside the traditional focus on language in itself, the applied dimension, as understood at the beginning of this paper, has developed substantially. The German language is nowadays increasingly examined from a broader socio-cultural perspective and it is seen as a social phenomenon influencing and influenced by various social phenomena of the past and present. Secondly, compared with other areas of German Studies, Linguistics is rather a peripheral phenomenon, particularly in respect to postgraduate research and teaching curricula. If we take postgraduate research as a prediction of what the future will look like, then the result is not particularly optimistic for German Linguistics. Furthermore, on the basis of this small survey, it can be concluded that the exposure to the systematic analysis of language, its structure and functions, is, among undergraduate students, rather limited. At best, they will acquire some knowledge of the history of the German language and its regional and social

Where Have All the Linguists Gone?

25

varieties. Very few will be informed in a systematic way about its phonological, morphological and syntactical peculiarities.

4. The role of Linguistics in British German Studies By the way of a summary, this section will attempt to discuss some benefits of systematic linguistics training for teaching in British German Studies. The role of Linguistics in research will not be considered. Over the last few decades, teaching has been one of the areas of British German Studies to be treated in a rather stiefmütterlich fashion (cf. Coleman 2004: 156). The introduction of research quality controls and the related allocation of research funds has shifted the balance towards research, leaving teaching activities on the periphery (ibid.). Prestige is measured by research outputs and this output is mainly in literature. Coleman goes so far as to state that teaching is treated by many as a distraction (ibid.). Language teaching seems to suffer in particular. There is a growing tendency for language classes to be conducted by sessional teachers employed on the basis of being a native speaker of the target language, while research staff teach so-called ‘content courses’ (mainly in English). 16 While there are certainly many excellent teachers among part-time staff, the fact of being a native speaker is not sufficient to teach one’s mother tongue (Hinkel 2001). Given the current situation, Coleman argues, it is not difficult to foresee a situation in which the target language is not a marker of the disciplinary identity anymore. Sadly, this is already being played out, for example, by outsourcing language classes to language centres, where they are taught in no relation to the discipline of modern languages and are treated as auxiliary services (Reershemius 2001). If such little importance is attached to language — as an instrument and as an object of study — then one may justifiably ask what makes the discipline unique and why should it uphold its autonomy. German Literature / Culture can be happily taught (in English) in the departments of Comparative Literature — something which is also happening increasingly across the country and which, in my view, only accelerates the demise of German Studies.

16 Teaching in Departments of Modern Languages in the UK is structured on a strict distinction between language and content classes, which in a rather priggish way suggests that there is no content in language teaching. It further detaches language from the discipline of German Studies.

26

Sylvia Jaworska

The lack of importance attached to language has also had a negative effect on the level of linguistic competency achieved by students during their studies. Far and wide, the departments of German advertise their degree programmes by making reference to a high or near-native competence in spoken and written German of their graduates. At the same time, the prospectuses do not explicitly state what is actually meant by this high or near-native competence and how this will be achieved during the course of study (cf. Coleman 1996). Given the results obtained from a large scale study on student proficiency in the UK (Coleman 1996), doubts can be raised about those promises: according to Coleman (ibid.) only a small proportion of students of German (11%) achieve what many be described as a high level of proficiency. Coleman is, on the whole, very sceptical about the quality of language teaching offered in the departments. His study reveals that not much progress occurs during the course of study. The rapid progress which students make in the last two years of secondary education slows during the first two years at university. It accelerates again during the year abroad and “seems to stop once students return to the UK” (ibid.: XXX). Klapper and Rees (2004: 36) question the postulation that university teaching is responsible for poor proficiency arguing that individual learning differences are the cause of patchy improvements. While there are certainly some factors for this sober state of affairs over which the departments has little control, it is a rather distressing picture to see that not much linguistic progress is achieved at the university level. Two areas seem to suffer in particular: grammar and writing (Durrell 1993, Klapper / Rees 2003). Apart from the structural and financial reasons, language teaching has suffered because of the problems within the field itself. Whilst until the 1960s, it seemed unquestionable that its source discipline and the point of reference was Linguistics, in the last four decades or so language teaching has become a field subject to various ‘fashions’ and experiments in pedagogy and psychology. The dominant question was not what but how to teach. This is certainly a relevant issue but not central (and unique) to language teaching. However, this question did occupy most of the discussions and as a result, in the space of a few decades we witnessed the rise and fall of various paradigms. Currently, we are in the midst of constructivist and virtual ‘revolutions’. The effects of the new approaches on the actual language teaching have been less spectacular than their inventors claim (cf. Glück 1989, Hinkel

Where Have All the Linguists Gone?

27

2001). In fact, far and wide materials and books are used that are products of the old ‘marriage’ between language teaching and descriptive or contrastive linguistics, 17 while the new approaches and their “Lehrerpersönlichkeitsdesigns, kommunikative Übungstypologien, Handreichungen zum Overheadprojektoreinsatz” seem to be less successful (Glück 1997: 65). The content of foreign language teaching is the foreign language, its linguistics system from phonology to pragmatics. Those who teach it, have to possess a solid knowledge of this system. Glück (1997: 62) puts it in the nutshell, when he says: “Um unterrichten zu können, muss der Unterrichtende gewisse Vorstellung von dem Gegenstand haben, den er unterrichten soll. Will er Analysis unterrichten, sollte er Mathematik studiert haben, will er das Brückenbauen lehren, sollte er etwas von Statistik verstehen. Niemand wird kreative Mathematiker, die falsch rechnen, niemand wird selbstbestimmte Ingenieure, deren Brücken leider umfallen, haben wollen […] Wer Deutsch als Fremdsprache unterrichten will, muss also Deutsch können und kennen.”

Native speakers are undoubtedly role models in terms of “Deutsch können” but not necessarily in terms of “Deutsch kennen”. Why is the latter, i.e. the systematic knowledge of structures and forms so important? Let us have a look at some empirical evidence. Norris and Ortega (2000) conducted a systematic analysis of forty-nine experimental studies into the efficacy of language teaching. The analysis indicates that an explicit focus on forms results in great proficiency gains and leads to longer lasting benefits. This result is also corroborated by a longitudinal study conducted by Klapper and Rees (2003) in the context of German Studies in the UK. The authors have demonstrated that explicit instruction with focus on forms does result in greater proficiency, particularly when it is linked with meaning-based activities. A group of students who during their four-year degree programme received instructions combining communicative tasks with explicit attention to linguistic features achieved a much better overall proficiency than a group of students who were exposed to communicative tasks only. Foreign languages, when learned by adults, cannot be acquired to a higher standard without formal attention to forms and structures. In contrast to children, adults and adolescents make extensive use of cognitive and analytical strategies and achieve 17 For example Deutsche Grammatik für Ausländer (2001) by Helbig and Busha had in 26 years 17 editions. In England, Hammer’s German Grammar and Usage (2002) by Durrell reached now its 4th edition.

28

Sylvia Jaworska

good results, if they have learned: “nach einer expliziten Methode, bei der Grammatikregeln und kontrastive Vergleiche im Mittelpunkt standen” (Quetz 1995: 452). In any case, such teaching requires the careful guidance of a competent language teacher, who received systematic training in the linguistic systems underlying German (and English) and is able to pass it on. Of course, a teacher with a solid linguistic knowledge may not perform miracles but this would be a good starting point. But language is not only a system of phonological and morphosyntactical structures; it is above all a social fact, an interface between the individual and the societal. Linguistic developments and changes reveal a great deal about shifts in social structures often pointing to factors unaccounted for in the traditional studies of politics or history. The study of language as a social fact leads to the discovery of intriguing patterns and relations of power in human communication and demonstrates how these are influenced, maintained or dismantled by speech communities. This, in turn, vastly enhances our understanding of human behaviour, communication and communities. In British German Studies, such a perspective could offer a new stimulating dimension alongside the traditional study of literature and history. As demonstrated above, some departments have already included the study of language as a social fact in their curricula. However, this is, on the whole, a ‘drop in the ocean.’ The importance of linguistic insight for the discipline of modern languages is not a novel idea. The forefathers of British German Studies were convinced that the study of the German language is indispensible and integral to the discipline. Some 150 years ago, Adolphus Bernay in his lecture “On the German Language” delivered at Queen’s College, London highlighted: “There has also sprung up of late a fancy, that languages are best learnt without a grammar. Now, I grant, you may acquire a language without perusing a grammar book. Yet, unless you obtain a practical knowledge […] of the power of auxiliary words, inflections, government, and position, by which in that language notional words are formed into thoughts, you will neither understand, nor be understood.” [quoted in Flood 1999: 111].

It is this practical, applied knowledge, i.e. the linguistic insight, which is essential for understanding and communication, and these days needed more than ever in British German Studies. However, no improvements will

Where Have All the Linguists Gone?

29

be achieved, if the status of Linguistics, and language teaching in particular, continues to be undermined within the discipline. A change of ‘climate’ is required, which acknowledges that language is the core of the discipline and teaching German to high standards, by expert teachers, one of its main tasks.

Bibliography Aedler, Martin (1680): The High Dutch Minerva a-la-mode. London. The Author. [Anon] (1758): The true guide to the German language. London. Nourse. Batts, Michael (1999): Die englische Germanistik um 1896 — eine importierte oder eine bodenständige Disziplin? In: Fürbeth, Frank / Krügel, Pierre / Metzner, Ernst Erich / Müller, Olaf (eds.): Zur Geschichte und Problematik der Nationalphilologien in Europa. Tübingen. Niemeyer, 379–387. Bausinger, Hermann (1999): Da capo: Germanistik als Kulturwissenschaft. In: Jahrbuch Deutsch als Fremdsprache 25, 213–231. Bernays, Adolphus (1829): German poetical anthology. London. The author. Bernays, Adolphus (1830): A compendious German grammar with a dictionary of prefixes and affixes: alphabetically arranged according to the recent investigations of J. Grimm, and other distinguished grammarians. London. Treuttel & Co. Bernays, Adolphus (1852): German Word-Book; a comparative vocabulary displaying the close affinity between the German and English languages. London. J. W. Parker & Son. Brereton, Cloudesley (1905): The Teaching of Modern Languages. London. Blakie & Son. Breul, H. Karl (1904): Das Deutsche im Munde der Deutschen im Auslande. In: Die Neueren Sprachen 12/8, 449–461. Breul, H. Karl (1909a): Modern Language Work at Cambridge during the last twenty-five years. In: Modern Language Teaching 5/6), 1–16. Breul, H. Karl (1909b): The teaching of Modern Foreign Languages and the Training of Teachers. Cambridge University Press. Cambridge. Breul, H. Karl (1909c): Cassell's German and English dictionary. London. Cassell. Brumfit, Christopher (1997): How applied linguistics is the same as any other science. In: International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 7/1, 86–94. Coleman, James (2004): Modern Languages in British Universities. Past and Present. In: Arts & Humanities in Higher Education 3/2, 147–162.

30

Sylvia Jaworska

Coleman, James (1996): Studying Languages. A survey of British and European students. London.CILT. Crystal, David (1986): Linguistic and Language Study. In: Barbour, Stephen (ed.): Linguistics in German Teaching — Luxury or Necessity? Modern German Studies. Birmingham. Aston University, 3–9. Crystal, David (2003): Linguistics. In: Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics. 5th edition. Oxford / Malden / Berlin. Blackwell, 272–273. Davies, Alan / Catherine Elder (2004): General Introduction. Applied Linguistics: Subject to Discipline? In: The Handbook of Applied Linguistics. Oxford / Malden / Berlin. Blackwell, 1–15. Davies, Winifried (1995): Linguistic Variation and Language Attitudes in Mannheim-Neckarau. Stuttgart. Franz Steiner. Durrell, Martin (1993): Can we teach Grammar to students? In: Harden, Theo / Marsh, Cliona (eds.): Wieviel Grammatik braucht der Mensch? München. Iudicium, 56–74. Durrell, Martin (2002): Hammer’s German Grammar and Usage. 4th edition. London, Arnold. Durrell, Martin (2003): Register, Variation und Fremdsprachenvermittlung. Zum Problem des Deutschunterrichts in Großbritannien. In: Stickel, Gerhard (ed.): Deutsch von außen. Berlin / New York. W. de Gruyter, 239– 258. Durrell, Martin (2004): Variation im Deutschen aus der Sicht von Deutsch als Fremdsprache. In: Der Deutschunterricht 56/1, 69–77. Fandrych, Christian (2006): Germanistik — pluralistisch, kontrastiv, interdisziplinär. In: Deutsch als Fremdsprache 44 /2, 71–78. Fiedler, G. Hermann / Sandbach E. Francis (1906a): A First German Course for Science Students. London. Alexander Moring, the De La More Press. Fiedler, G. Hermann / Sandbach E. Francis (1906b): A Second German Course for Science Students: Readings from Recent German Scientific Publications. London. Alexander Moring, the De La More Press. Flood, L. John (1999): Ginger beer and sugared cauliflower. Adolphus Bernays and language teaching in nineteenth-century London. In: Görner, Rüdiger / Kelly-Holmes, Helen (eds.): Vermittlungen. German Studies at the turn of the century. München. Idicium, 101–115. Flood, L. John (2001): The London branch of the Allgemeiner Deutscher Sprachverein. In: Jones, William / Flood, L. John / Yeandle, David / Davies, Maire (eds.): Proper Words in Proper Places: Studies in Lexicology and Lexicography in Honour of William Jervis Jones. Akademischer Verlag. Stuttgart, 230–253.

Where Have All the Linguists Gone?

31

Glück, Helmut (1989): Meins und Deins = Unsers? Über das Fach "Deutsch als Fremdsprache" und die "Interkulturelle Germanistik". In: Zimmermann, Peter (ed.): Interkulturelle Germanistik. Dialog der Kulturen auf Deutsch? Frankfurt am Main. Peter Lang, 57–90. Glück, Helmut (1997): Das Deutsche als Fremdsprache, die Politik und die Turbodidaktik: Konturen eines alten Problems. In: Germanistische Linguistik, 137–138, 55–70. Helbig, Gerhard / Busha, Joachim (2001): Deutsche Grammatik. Ein Handbuch für den Ausländerunterricht. Berlin / München. Langenscheidt. Hinkel, Richard (2001): Sind "native speaker" wirklich die besseren Fremdsprachenlehrer? Fremdperspektive in DaF Unterricht und Auslandsgermanistik. In: Info DaF 28/6, 585–599. Howatt, P. Anthony (1982): Language teaching must start afresh! In: ELT 36/4, 263–268. Hüllen, Werner (2004): Linguistics. In: Byram, Michael (ed.): Routledge Encyclopedia of Language Learning and Teaching. London / New York. Routledge, 365–370. Husbands, T. Christopher (2007): German Academics in British Universities during the First World War: The case of Karl Wichmann. In: German Life and Letters 60/4, 493–517. King, John (1715): A royal complete grammar, English and High-German. London. Barker and King. Klapper, John/ Rees, Jonathan (2003): Reviewing the case for explicit grammar instruction in the university foreign language learning context. In: Language Teaching Research 7/3, 285–314. Klapper, John / Rees, Jonathan (2004): Marks, get set, go: an evaluation of entry levels and progress rates on a university foreign language programme. In: Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education 29/1, 21–39. Langer, Nils / Davies, Winifried (eds.) (2005): Linguistic Purism in the Germanic Languages. Berlin / New York. W. de Gruyter. Langer, Nils (2001): Linguistic Purism in Action: how auxiliary 'tun' was stigmatized in Early New High German. Berlin / New York. W. de Gruyter. Lodge, Anthony (2000): Higher Education. In: Green, Simon (ed.): New Perspectives on Teaching and Learning Modern Languages. Clevedon. Multilingual Matters, 105–123. Meara, Paul. (2004): Applied Linguistics. In: Byram, Michael (ed.): Routledge Encyclopedia of Language Learning and Teaching. London / New York. Routledge, 32–37.

32

Sylvia Jaworska

Millward, William (2001): Life in and out of Hut 3. In: Hinsley, F. H. / Stripp, Alan (eds.): Codebreakers: The Inside Story of Bletchley Park. Oxford. Oxford University Press, 17–29. Musolff, Andreas (2004): Metaphor and Political Discourse: Analogical Reasoning in Debates about Europe. London. Palgrave Macmillan. Norris, John / Ortega, Lourdes (2000): Effectiveness of L2 instruction: a research synthesis and quantitative meta-analysis. In: Language Learning, 50/3, 417–528. Ortmanns, Karl (1993): Deutsch in Großbritannien. Die Entwicklung von Deutsch als Fremdsprache von den Anfängen bis 1985. Stuttgart. Steiner. Pfalzgraf, Falco (2006): Neopurismus in Deutschland nach der Wende. Frankfurt am Main / Berlin / New York. Peter Lang. Priebsch, Robert / Collinson W. Edward (1966): The German language (6th edition). London. Faber. Offelen, Heinrich (1687): A double grammar for Germans to learn English; and for English-Men to learn the German tongue. London. The Author. Quetz, Jürgen (1995): Erwerb von Fremdsprachen im Erwachsenenalter. In: Bausch, Karl Richard / Christ, Herbert / Krumm, Hans Jürgen (eds.): Handbuch Fremdsprachenunterricht. 3rd edition. Tübingen / Basel. Francke, 451–456. Rash, Felicity (2007): The Language of Violence: Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf. New York. Peter Lang. Reershemius, Gertrud (1998): Gesprochene Sprache als Gegenstand des Grammatikunterrichts. In: Info DaF 25/4, 399–405. Reershemius, Gertrud (2001): Plädoyer für die Entwicklung einer integrativen Didaktik im Bereich der "German Studies". In: Gfl-Journal 3, 31–44. Reershemius, Gertrud (2004): Niederdeutsch in Ostfriesland. Zwischen Sprachkontakt, Sprachveränderung und Sprachwechsel. Stuttgart. Steiner. Sagarra, Eda (1998): The centenary oft he Henry Simon Chair of German at the University of Manchester (1996): Commemorative Address. In: German Life and Letters 52/4, 509–525. Sagarra, Eda (1999): Die britische Germanistik 1896–1946. In: Fürbeth, Frank / Krügel, Pierre / Metzner, Ernst Erich / Müller, Olaf (eds.): Zur Geschichte und Problematik der Nationalphilologien in Europa. Tübingen. Niemeyer, 683–696. Sitta, Horst (2004): Inlandsgermanistik — Auslandsgermanistik. Was für einen Sinn hat eine solche Unterscheidung? In: Deutsch als Fremdsprache 41/4, 195–198.

Where Have All the Linguists Gone?

33

Stevenson, Patrick / Barbour, Stephen (1998): Variation im Deutschen: soziolinguistische Perspektiven. Berlin / New York. W. de Gruyter. van der Lubbe, Fredericka (2007): Martin Aedler and the 'High Dutch Minerva'. The First German Grammar for the English. Frankfurt. Peter Lang. Viëtor, Wilhelm (1882): Der Sprachunterricht muss umkehren! Ein Beitrag zur Überbürdungsfrage von Quousque Tandem. Heilbronn. Henninger. von Polenz, Peter (1988): Sprachkritik und Sprachnormenkritik. In: Heringer, H. Jürgen (ed). Holzfeuer im hölzernen Ofen. Aufsätze zur politischen Sprachkritik. Tübingen. Narr Verlag, 70-93. Wichmann, Karl (1932): Pocket dictionary of the German and English languages. London. Routledge.

34

In: Falco Pfalzgraf (Hg.) (2008): Englischer Sprachkontakt in den Varietäten des Deutschen / English in Contact with Varieties of German. Wien, Frankfurt a. M. u.a. Peter Lang Verlag. S. 35– 51.

Anthony STANFORTH (Heriot-Watt University/UK, Department of Languages and Intercultural Studies)

[email protected]

The Influence of High German on the English Language Abstract While borrowings from High German represent a small element within English the impact of German science and technology has led to the introduction to a large number of technical terms. The German origin of many of these is unrecognised because they were coined using Greek and Latin elements. In an historical survey the cultural and technological influences which gave rise to the borrowings are reviewed and a final section discusses the integration and use of German terms in English.

1. Scale and Impact It is not easy to assess in numerical terms the contribution that one language makes to the vocabulary of another. Consider, for instance, the following two apparently contradictory statements. First: “High German has made comparatively little impact on English” (Pyles 1971: 332). The second: “Das deutsche Wortgut im Wortschatz der Amerikaner und Engländer ist weit größer und reichhaltiger, als es bisherige Untersuchungen haben vermuten lassen” (Pfeffer 1987: 1). In fact, both are true. The first assertion, by Thomas Pyles, is viewing the High German element in the context of the entire English word stock, while the second, by Pfeffer, is offering a corrective to earlier estimates. The first scholar to attempt a reasoned estimate was C.T. Carr in 1934. That he was able to do so with a greater degree of precision than had been possible hitherto was thanks to that most significant event in the history of English lexicography, the completion in 1928 of the NED on Historical Principles. This provided scholars with an invaluable lexicological tool. It was re-published in 1933, together with a Supplement, and renamed the OED, and the following year Carr (1934) published his monograph The German Influence on the English Vocabulary, in which he identified 820 items taken from German; to these he added a few more in 1940 in an article in MLR. During the 1970s I was able to supplement Carr’s OED words with

36

Anthony Stanforth

a further 341 post-OED items which I gleaned from whatever source I could, but primarily by means of a systematic search of The Observer, bringing the total to 1161 words (Stanforth 1974). Some of these were subsequently covered by the four instalments of the new Supplement to the OED that appeared between 1972 and 1986. Three years after that the Second Edition of the OED appeared. This incorporates the first edition and both Supplements as well as adding some new material. Since the Second Edition was brought out on CD-ROM and incorporates various electronic search features, it had been my hope when writing my 1996 monograph that the Germanisms would have been tagged to enable them to be counted electronically. Unfortunately this proved not to be possible; while it could be done with unrelated languages such as Japanese, the tagging procedure failed to distinguish between cognates and etymological origin. I have not worked through the whole dictionary manually. Short of doing that, a more up-to-date idea of the numerical extent of German borrowing may be gained by consulting Pfeffer and Cannon's German Loanwords in English (1994), which attempts full lexicological coverage; it is based on Pfeffer’s earlier German-language version published in 1987. Pfeffer & Cannon’s dictionary lists 5380 items borrowed from German, a figure considerably higher than Carr’s and my own. The reason for this is that it includes a large number of technical and scientific terms. Now these constitute one of the most important elements of the German contribution to our language, even though they do not form part of our everyday core vocabulary. An estimate of the total number of words taken from German is only one statistic. Another is how many of these are widely used, and yet another is how many are still used. The OED is an historical dictionary, and contains many items now obsolete. Not many of us have heard of the card game called gleek, borrowed via French in 1533 from MHG gelücke, and even more recent loans may be short-term residents. One such is the use of the German cry of surrender, Kamerad, first recorded in English in 1914 and used not only in German contexts but in English ones as well. Recently I came across a fascinating glimpse of the fading away of this loan in one of Angela Thirkell’s later novels (Close Quarters 1958: 207). Conceding the loss of an argument, one of the characters calls “Kamerad! […] with a gesture of putting up his

The Influence of High German on the English Language

37

hands and Mrs Macfadyen laughed and said he was a bit out-of-date and no one would know what he meant now.” The total count, then, is swollen by scientific and technical terms largely unknown to non-specialists, and by obsolete words and nonce borrowings. By disregarding these, Carr estimated the number of German loans “in daily use” “in ordinary English” (1934: 88) as not exceeding 200. Within my total of 1161, I identified 868 items that were obsolete, were highly arcane, were nonce borrowings or names, and after deducting these arrived at a comparable total of 293. While it is notoriously difficult to arrive at precise numbers when measuring vocabulary, and while the actual totals themselves do not mean a lot, they are necessary if we are to attempt an estimate of the relative size of the various etymological components that together make up the English language. A work that has attempted this is Manfred Scheler’s Der englische Wortschatz (1977). This uses not the main OED but the Chronological English Dictionary (which is based on the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary). Scheler found that borrowings from High German accounted for a mere 0·5%, behind Dutch with 1·42% and Scandinavian with 2·16%. If we were to use Pfeffer & Cannon’s higher figure of 5380 and the total number of items in the OED2, namely 500,000, we still only arrive at a percentage of 1%. Returning to the two statements with which I opened this section, we find them reconciled in the conclusion of Carr’s monograph. “The influence of German on the ordinary vocabulary of English is” he says “[…] not very considerable […] however, […] the number of German words used in ordinary English is much greater than would be assumed from the scanty lists of loan-words usually given in historical grammars of English.” (Carr 1934: 89)

2. Terminology & Typology of Borrowing 2.1 The expression ‘borrowing’ is widely used in studies of linguistic contact, as is also the term ‘loan-word’, itself a 19th century loan-translation from German. Given their familiarity I shall continue to use them in this paper, even though the terminology is not ideal, not least because it suggests an obligation to return what has been borrowed. More rigorous

38

Anthony Stanforth

terminologies speak of ‘importation’ and ‘substitution’, or ‘transference’ and ‘reproduction’. 2.2 Borrowings are not always obvious. Some loan-words may have become so assimilated into the borrowing language that their foreign provenance is no longer recognisable. Others are translated as they enter the language, thereby shedding their foreign plumage. Over the years various loan-word typologies have been proposed, with varying degrees of complexity. For our purpose today it is sufficient to set out the main categories that we shall encounter as we outline the German contribution to English. I shall illustrate each type with examples taken from our German loan material. 2.2.1 We start with ‘loan-words proper’; these are straight ‘importations’ or ‘transfers’ of German words. They may be completely unaltered in spelling, such as kindergarten and schadenfreude, or they may undergo spelling changes, as in poodle and larch. The longer a loan-word resides in the language, the greater the likelihood of its losing its foreign appearance as it is ‘digested’ by the host language. 2.2.2 Compound words from German may be borrowed whole (leberwurst) or translated (liver sausage). Such ‘loan-translations’ may also be partial, with either the first or second element translated — apple strudel, eigenvalue. Recently I found cloud-grazer. Could this be a translation of Wolkenkratzer, notwithstanding the fact that the German word translates English sky-scraper? Moreover, as Wolkenkratzer in German illustrates, the translation can vary in its degree of closeness. Such free translation is rare in our English material; consider, though, homesickness rendering Heimweh, or shock troops for Stoßtruppen. 2.2.3 Instead of importing a foreign term, or translating one or both of its elements, the sense of an existing word can be extended under the influence of a foreign term. These are the ‘semantic loans’: examples are staff in its sense of military personnel from NHG Stab, or the philological terms strong and weak. 2.2.4 Semantic loans are invisible as borrowings, as are to a lesser extent full loan translations. And there is another category of words borrowed from German whose German origin is not readily recognisable.

The Influence of High German on the English Language

39

These are terms coined by German speakers but clothed in the international languages of science, Latin and Greek. It may come as something of a surprise to learn that the humble aspirin is a German coinage. Given the strength of German influence in the field of science this category of borrowing makes up a sizeable proportion of German loan material in English. Now that we have briefly reviewed the various forms borrowed material can take, let us turn now to the cultural impulses emanating from the German-speaking world, and their linguistic consequences.

3. Overview of German Borrowings in English 3.1 The first High German word to enter the English language did so in the 15th century. And as far as we know it came alone. Linguistic contact across the North Sea in the 15th century was predominantly with the Low Countries. However, in this single case the spelling allows us to be sure of the High German origin of the word. That word is glance in the compound glance-ore; it was first recorded in 1458. The HG word Glanz was taken into Dutch as glans, and from there it reached England. Apart from its significance as the first definite if indirect HG loan in English, it is also of interest as a harbinger of future borrowings in the field of mining and geology. 3.2 Apart from this word, the first borrowings of which we can be certain that they were of High German origin (i.e. the south German forms of German that became the modern standard language) entered English in the 16th century. Two main cultural impulses were responsible, the Reformation and a growing interest in botany. With the Reformation we have the first group of unambiguously HG borrowings — the historical trigger is known, the channels of transmission identifiable. And yet the Reformation provides us with a good example of the fact that although borrowing is the result of cultural influence, it is not true to say that the amount of borrowing is dependent on the degree of influence exerted. In comparison with the significance that the Reformation had for the British Isles, the number of borrowings it occasioned is very small indeed. Carr found a mere ten in the OED, of which only four have survived to the present day. These are weakling, Anabaptist, Protestant and papist. Coverdale’s Bible translation was made in Holland, from the “Douche and

40

Anthony Stanforth

Latin”. Since the word Douche could refer to Dutch and HG at this time, the possibility that he translated a Dutch version of Luther’s Bible must be borne in mind; nevertheless, firstling, Romanist (coined by Luther) and sinflood are held by the OED to be of German origin. Direct German influence is more certain in the case of Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament: Carr cites mercy seat for Luther’s Gnadenstuhl, shewbread for Luther’s Schaubrot and silverling for Silberling. Only slightly more numerous than the words entering English as a result of the Reformation and the activities of the Bible translators are a series of botanical terms. These were introduced by two scholars, William Turner, who published his Names of Herbes in 1548 and his New Herball in 1551, with a second edition in 1568, and Henry Lyte, whose Niewe Herball was published in 1578. But here again the difficulty of separating HG from Dutch influence is encountered, since we know that Turner travelled extensively in the Low Countries as well as Germany, and Lyte’s book is a re-working of the Cruydeboek of the Flemish botanist Rembert Dodoens, but from a French translation of that work! About a score of terms are reckoned by the OED to be of HG origin, using spelling and other evidence, as in the following example from Lyte under hole-wort: “This is called in Germanie holwurtz, that is to say in English hole wort or hollow root” (OED? Year, page?). Of the HG botanical terms only the following are still in widespread use, digitalis (1568) — a Latinisation of Fingerhut made in 1542 by the German botanist Fuchs — and larch (1548) from Lärche. Indeed, we might count larch as the first German loan-word to enter common, everyday English and to have survived. A handful of other words came into English during the 16th century, but indirectly, via intermediary languages; thus to carouse goes back to gar aus trinken, by way of French, as in the case also of fife, ultimately from NHG Pfeife; halt (1591) came to us by way of Spanish alto, and the spelling of dollar (1553), a clipping of Joachimsthaler, betrays its transmission via LG or Dutch. 3.3 With the 17th century the importance of German scientific and technical terms for the English language becomes evident, though we must remember that some of the borrowings are Neo-Latin coinages: for example

The Influence of High German on the English Language

41

Paracelsus’s terms laudanum, salamander and sylph, and Kepler’s dioprical, focus, inertia and satellite. While such coinages reflect the German contribution to the international language of science, there is one area of influence in the 17th century where German influence is direct and in many cases oral. That area is mining. German miners had first been brought to English shores in the 13th century by Richard of Cornwall to work the Cornish tin mines. In the 16th century the British government negotiated with German mining companies with a view to getting superior German expertise to exploit British iron deposits, and Carr tells us that in the 17th century “James I empowered Gerard Malynes to bring over German workmen to work the lead mines in Yorkshire and the silver mines in Durham; whilst Prince Rupert brought German miners to Ecton in Staffordshire to teach the use of gunpowder in mining operations.” (1934: 45) From this tradition of using German expertise Carr concludes that “the possibility of German words penetrating into the English dialects cannot […] be denied.” He does not, however, offer any examples. Of the 14 or so terms that entered the written language, cobalt and zinc are the survivors best known to the non-specialist. We shall see that German and mineralogical terms will enter the language in increasing numbers during the two succeeding centuries. The importance of German in this field may be seen in the fact that until well into the 20th century many British university students of geology, mineralogy and metallurgy had to learn and pass examinations in German. Largely as a result of the Thirty Years War some military terms entered the language, such as howitzer from Haubitze, which German had imported from Czech, the translation field marshal, the word spanner, originally meaning ‘instrument by which the spring in a fire-arm was wound up’ but later widening and generalising its meaning, and the semantic loan we have already encountered: staff from Stab. Finally, the 17th century saw the first two culinary terms enter the language. Finding great favour in Britain, Hochheimer wine became known as hock (1625), giving us an example both of clipping, and of phonemic substitution in the absence of the phoneme [x] in English. Moreover, the term subsequently expanded its meaning to embrace German white wine

42

Anthony Stanforth

generally. The unclipped form hockamore, now obsolete, is attested 48 years later, though that does not mean that it hadn’t been borrowed earlier, merely that the OED does not have an earlier example. The other word is sauerkraut, first attested as early as 1617. 3.4 It is perhaps surprising that, although the number of germanisms entering English increased in the 18th century, this did not happen until the second half of that century — surprising since in 1714 George I ascended the throne, which remained in Hanoverian possession until the death of William IV in 1837. In 1714, then, the English entered, to quote R. J. White (1967: 194), “the long flat plain of the Hanoverian age, the happiest, if not the noblest era of its modern history”. But George I could not speak English, and even his son George II (1727–60) is said to have had a strong German accent. We may glean a picture of the Babel that must have been prevalent at court as a result of the international marriage market from a comment (admittedly dating from the 19th century) attributed to Princess Charlotte, the daughter of the Duke of Brunswick and daughter-in-law of George III: ‘And when I did look around at them I said to myself, “A quoi bon this dull assemblage of tiresome persons […] Mein Gott! Dat is de dullest person Gott Almighty ever did born”. (Bryant 1954: 105) But the fact that the monarch could not speak his subjects’ language did not seem to cause problems. After all, as Carr (1934: 50) points out, the pre-eminence of French in the 18th century in both Germany and England probably accounts for the relatively limited number of borrowings until the second half of that century, when the number of geological and mineralogical terms increased dramatically. Most of these are still in use, but chiefly in technical registers. More widely known are graphite, nickel (via Swedish) and quartz, this last item now having become a household word as a result of the application of quartz to timepiece technology. From this period too stem the terms homesickness, that rather free translation of Swiss-German Heimweh, pumpernickel, waltz, statistics and swindler. 3.5 With the 19th century the influx of borrowings from German peaked. 474 items, that is over half the 820 or so loans gleaned by Carr from the OED that entered English between 1458 and 1933 fall into this century, and most of these were borrowed during two short periods — between 1830 and 1850 under the influence of Thomas Carlyle, and between 1870 and 1890, when the majority of borrowings were scientific and technical.

The Influence of High German on the English Language

43

The scientific vocabulary — much of it in Latin and Greek disguise — may be divided into the following categories: 1) the traditional areas of mineralogy and geology, e.g triassic, watershed; 2) chemistry: morphine, biochemical, saccharine, aspirin; 3) physics: spectrometer, dynamo, x-rays; 4) medicine: bacterium, streptococcus, tuberculin; 5) biology: the word biology itself, edelweiss, plankton; 6) psychology: suppression, a translation of Wundt’s term Verdrängung. In the arts and humanities we see the borrowed material clustering under the headings of literature, philosophy, philology and pedagogy. In these areas the number of words made up of German (as opposed to GraecoLatin) elements is greater. German literary influence in the 19th century is associated first with the mediation of Henry Mackenzie and Walter Scott; secondly with the reception of Mme de Staël’s book on Germany, with S.T. Coleridge and with Thomas Carlyle; and thirdly with Matthew Arnold. Among the terms borrowed are dramaturgy, mastersinger, philistine, storm and stress and time-spirit — these last two nowadays occurring more frequently in their untranslated form. Most of the philosophical vocabulary from German takes the form of semantic loans such as, for example, Kant’s terms form, idea, intuition, reason, understanding. An appropriate example to illustrate philological influence is the translation loan-word, which dates from 1874, while education may be represented by the terms kindergarten, seminar and semester. It is somewhat surprising that the strong influence of German music has not led to more terms being borrowed. Those that have entered English, such as kapellmeister, concert-master, chorale, schottische (pronounced as if French), alpenhorn, glockenspiel, leitmotiv (also spelled with , reflecting French mediation), occur with great frequency. It would seem that English music terminology had already been largely formed under Italian influence. We must remember that when Georg Friedrich Händel came to England in the 18th century he immediately lost his umlaut (another philological term coined by Klopstock and borrowed in 1852) and was

44

Anthony Stanforth

thereupon considered by the English to be their greatest national composer! But Handel espoused the Italian tradition. 3.6 In the 20th century we find that the number of new loans from German entering English starts to decline. Two main periods of borrowing can be identified: the years before the First World War, when the same subject areas that had been responsible for supplying so many terms in the 19th century continued to be influential, and the war years themselves. During the pre-war years then, science and technology gave us relativity (in Einstein’s sense of the word), to activate in the sense of ‘making radioactive’, bakelite, mutant, while Austro-German eminence in the field of psychology meant that we adopted terms such as autism, complex, libido and psychoanalysis. But very few of the words adopted were recognisably German. Carr found in the OED dreikanter ‘angular pebbles cut by sand’, graben ‘a rift valley’, klip ‘a stranded mass of rock’, knallgas ‘detonating gas’, but most of the scientific vocabulary consists of neo-Greek and neo-Latin formations, which, of course, facilitated their absorption into international scientific discourse. In the arts a few more musical terms are imported, such as heckelphone, rare enough today, and the translations tone-poem (1902) and music drama (1909) — this latter intimately linked with the operas of Richard Wagner, though it is interesting to note that Wagner (1872) himself rejected the term. The first rendering of Nietzsche’s term Übermensch was overman, but George Bernard Shaw provided the translation superman in 1903, and it was this version that has survived, helped by the fact that it forms part of the title of his play Man and Superman. A lot of the words that we associate with the Second World War were in fact borrowed during the First, for example ersatz, flame-thrower, shocktroops, to strafe, U-boat. Then, between 1939 and 1945, these were augmented by Abwehr, luftwaffe, Panzer, and the especially potent and productive blitzkrieg, its punning variant sitzkrieg and the even more productive clipping blitz. To the military words may be added political terms deriving from the National Socialist period, such as entjudung, erziehungslager, judenfrage,

konzentrationslager, lebensraum, Nazi, putsch, rasseecht, reich, sieg heil,

The Influence of High German on the English Language

45

volk, völkisch. It is worth noting that konzentrationslager and blitzkrieg, despite their strong associations with Germany, are, in fact German loan translations from English that have been reborrowed back into English as loanwords: the term ‘concentration camp’ was first used during the Second Boer War and ‘lightening warfare’ was first coined by the military historian Sir Basil Liddell Hart in the period between the First and Second World Wars. (Stanforth 1975: 114–115 & OED 1972:602) At the end of his study of germanisms recorded in the OED, Carr (1934: 89) explained the relative paucity of German loans in English by the fact that “[…] there has been no great event in German history which has appealed to the imagination of the English as the French Revolution did.” As he was writing those words events were in train which were to have a disastrous impact on our attitude towards things German, and the terms I have just listed still pack an emotional punch, and are still used, and not necessarily in a German context, with the word Nazi leading the field. Since the war borrowing has continued, but not with the same intensity. Our press uses Germanisms when reporting German political institutions and events (land, länder, fraktion, rathaus), the arts have provided a few more terms not found in the first edition of the OED such as bildungsroman, gesamtkunstwerk, kitsch, schmalz, weltschmerz, flugelhorn, gebrauchsmusik, lieder, and our greater openness to foreign food together with its easier availability has enabled a few more culinary items to be imported: bockwurst, bratwurst, eisbein, leberwurst, sauerbraten. These continue a tradition that started in the 17th century with hock and sauerkraut and which is continued in British supermarkets, where stollen and quark are now commonplace. As the century progressed the influx of scientific and technical vocabulary declined even further, though we should record the highly productive term angst which has widened its scope well beyond the technical language of psychology, and is frequently used by laymen in compounds such as angst-ridden. The dearth of new scientific borrowings may be a reflection of the growing importance of English as an international scientific language in the twentieth century. On the other hand we find several words from the field of economics reflecting the importance of western Germany’s economic recovery after the war. Indeed, the word to describe this, wirtschaftswunder

46

Anthony Stanforth

quickly came to be used independently of a German context, the true indication of a loan becoming fully at home and productive in its new surroundings. Pfeffer (1987: 20) detected a resurgence in Germany’s scientific and technological importance — “ja, des deutschen Kulturwesens überhaupt” — and predicted a renewed increase in borrowing into American and British English. It is not clear to me on what he based his assertion, and the evidence for any increase in the rate of borrowing is as yet lacking. As the new century progresses the dominance of English as the world language of science and technology — for the time being at any rate — would seem to rule out a new wave of German borrowings, which is not to say that we will not continue to import from the German-speaking world whatever terms seem convenient to us.

4. The Integration and Use of German Borrowings in English In this paper I have concentrated on the cultural and historical movements and events that led to the borrowing of German words and phrases. Now I will indicate some other ways in which English has ‘digested’ the loan material and how it makes use of it. 4.1 First, how do we pronounce it? Basically, English-speakers pronounce borrowings either in imitation of the original (phonetic substitution) as in [strA…f], or by following the English logic of the written form (spelling pronunciation) so [streif]. This is by far the most frequent route followed. And of course, consistency does not enter into it: we may eat sauerkraut, drive an Audi (both [au]), but we shave with a Braun: [O…]. 4.2 Another aspect of the process of assimilation is the morphological adaptation of the word to the host language: poodles, larches, for instance, or to abseil, abseiling. Morphological assimilation of German material in English poses little difficulty: whereas Anglicisms in German undergo an additive process, having to acquire gender, inflection and so on, germanisms in English are subject to a reductive process: there are no genders, adjectives are uninflected (“gemütlich television pop shows”), nouns (which make up the vast majority of the loans) only inflect in the genitive singular (“the heldentenor's common difficulty”) and simply form the plural with /(e)s/:

The Influence of High German on the English Language

47

gauleiters. Moreover, they benefit from the easy shift from one word-class to another that is such a characteristic of English — thus we find kitsch as an adjective, we read “in a heurigen garden”, I even heard on BBC Radio 4 “we angst over our domestic problems”. Nor does affixation present any problems. In our material we find three borrowed prefixes and one suffix that are worth noting for their productivity: the prefixes are ur- and echtcombining effortlessly to give us, for example ur-author and ur-woman, or echt-lyrical, echt-English and so on; über- with or without umlaut is another — recently I came across uber-city referring to Shanghai. The suffix is -fest, nowadays much favoured by event organisers: — filmfest, rockfest, schmaltzfest even. 4.3 It might be expected that as the germanisms are assimilated into the host language they would undergo semantic changes, but I have found very few examples of fundamental semantic shift. Such modification as does occur concerns either at the moment of borrowing, or it occurs after borrowing and during the period of assimilation. At the moment of borrowing we commonly find the restriction of the semantic range that the word has in German (strudel, for instance, only has a culinary meaning in English, angst was borrowed only as a technical term of psychology), while after borrowing we may observe the following phenomena: (1)

the application of a term to non-German contexts (autobahns in Los Angeles, for example, “the Vatican’s Ostpolitik”, wirtschaftswunder with reference to Spain);

(2)

the development of figurative meanings (blitzkrieg is a particularly fecund example, “a whole hinterland of knowledge”, “to take the flak”, watershed);

(3)

the freeing of specialist terms from their technical register (angst again, or focus, saccharine, as in “a saccharine smile”).

The word delicatessen has evolved in an interesting way. First it was borrowed into German from French délicatesse and compounded to produce Delikatessengeschäft. It came to us via American English, the first instances suggesting a loan translation of the German compound delicatessen shop, but later the shop element was dropped, leaving the first element to change its sense from the delicacies sold to the shop itself, now of course usually clipped

48

Anthony Stanforth

to deli. 4.4 So how does English, or rather its speakers and writers, make use of the German element in its vocabulary? To express a concept, certainly. But words do more than this. What function, beyond the expression of a particular concept, does the use of germanisms have? Clearly, this question is linked to their degree of assimilation. If we do not recognise a word as borrowed, we cannot achieve any functional or stylistic effect on the basis of its foreignness. But words whose German provenance is visible can be used, especially when English equivalents are available, to create an effect. It makes a difference whether we say or write zeitgeist rather than spirit of the age. The effect can be functional — either to draw attention to a word in some way: “Now the music of the pipes — or doodlesack as the Germans have it […]”, or for the sake of precision, with or without an explanatory gloss: “[…] a former head teacher from Leipzig, and now a victim of Berufsverbot (the banning of left-wing, mainly former communists, from posts in local government) […]”; or it can be used to create a German atmosphere, as the following extracts from Somerset Maugham’s Ashenden illustrate: “Ach, Grantley, I have not the time” (1991: 188); “Come, […] Mittagessen is ready” (1991: 193); Dummer Kerl, she said, in a soft voice. ‘Stupid fellow […].” (1991: 192) On the other hand the choice of the German word may be to achieve a particular stylistic effect. To use a German term, even when an English equivalent is available, can lend authenticity in a German context: “the critics received the work [by Paul Dessau] with predictable Ehrfurcht”; “the obsessions of the German hausfrau”. This last example leads us to the use of German words for humorous effect, which frequently means playing on Anglo-Saxon preconceptions and unfortunately prejudices. Inevitably certain German words, whether military or not, have the power to evoke the memory of two world wars and may be used to achieve a negative stylistic impact: panzer, blitzkrieg, führer, gauleiter but also diktat, verboten. Even when these are used outside a German context — and all these just listed can be — the negative associations are there. And other stereotypical images are evoked: German fräuleins (sexy, with or without their umlaut), German hausfraus (worthy and hardworking, but definitely not sexy), , German scholarship (thorough but stodgy, “predictable Ehrfurcht”), Kultur (too serious, as is suggested by the following: “There is something touchingly European about Mr. Heath’s very belief that Kultur provides an appropriate manner of celebrating historic events”. (The Observer, 07.01.1973). There is

The Influence of High German on the English Language

49

plenty of evidence for all these, especially in the press, a rich source, but of course, just one, and often rather lurid one. But all is not entirely negative — our admiration for German technology and engineering, and especially for German motor cars, brings with it the use of germanisms with positive associations, especially in the sphere of advertising. In Edinburgh Tennants Brewery claimed that “There’s bier (note the German spelling), and there’s Goldbier” — evoking associations of Germany as the home of good beer. In 1991 Rover said of its 820 series: “You can be sure it’s schnell”, thus at the same time managing a pun on the slogan “You can be sure it’s Shell”. Also in Scotland there is a chain of shoe shops rejoicing in the name “Schuh — Clothing for Feet”. One must assume that whoever came up with those names must have known German. But the best known example has to be “Vorsprung durch Technik”, a highly successful slogan that has been used now for over 20 years, both in written and spoken form. As a supreme and final example of German being used as a functional device consider the full page advertisement taken out in The Observer in 1987, which opened with the question: “Many have asked the meaning of Vorsprung durch Technik”. Allow us to explain.” There followed a whole page of technical specification entirely in German! At this point the denotation is irrelevant, the purpose has become entirely functional. 4.5 Given the enmity that existed between Britain and Germany as a result of two world wars in the 20th Century it is worth asking whether there are any signs of linguistic purism. There are not. Borrowings from German constitute, as we have seen, a tiny element in the vocabulary of English, in no way enough to pose any kind of linguistic threat to a language that has borrowed and continues to borrow widely from languages spread across the globe. In America, where large-scale immigration from the German-speaking countries of Europe have led to what is termed intimate borrowing, some German words, especially terms relating to German food and drink, are met even more frequently than in Britain. Now linguistic purism is as foreign to America as it is over here. But patriotism (or is it chauvinism?) is something else again, and this did lead to the replacement during the First World War of the term sauerkraut which is more widely eaten in North America than here. And the substitute? “Liberty cabbage”. It was short-lived! Not so, however, the clipping of that term to kraut, and its use as a pejorative term

50

Anthony Stanforth

for a German. Nor is there any evidence in this country of a disinclination to use German loans, indeed, as we have seen they may be used to express a dislike of certain German political and military actions, and, sadly, to reflect preconceptions and prejudice. I relish the priggishness of one of the earliest quotations in the OED (1933: 194) to illustrate schadenfreude: “There is no English word for schadenfreude, because there is no such feeling here.” Enough said, I think.

References Bryant, Arthur (1954): The Age of Elegance. London. Collins. Carr, Charles Telford (1934): The German Influence on the English Vocabulary. In: Society for Pure English, Tract 42. Carr, Charles Telford (1940): Some Notes on German Loan-Words in English. In: MLR 33, 69–71. A Chronological English Dictionary. Listing 80,000 Words in Order of their Earliest Known Occurrence (1970): Eds. Finkenstaedt, Thomas / Leisi, Ernst / Wolff, Dieter. Heidelberg. Winter. [Dodoens, Rembert] (1554): Cruydeboeck. Antwerp. [Lyte, Henry] (1578): A Niewe Herball, or Historie of Plantes. Antwerp. Maugham, W. Somerset (1991): Ashenden: Or the British Agent. London. Mandarin. The Oxford English Dictionary (1933): A correct reissue of A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles. Eds. James A. H. Murray / Bradley, Henry / Craigie, Sir William A. / Onions, Charles Talbut. Oxford. O.U.P. The Oxford English Dictionary. Supplement (1933): Eds. Craigie, Sir William A. / Onions, Charles Talbut. Oxford. O.U.P. The Oxford English Dictionary. Supplement I, A–G (1972): Ed. Burchfield, Robert William. Oxford. O.U.P. The Oxford English Dictionary. Supplement II, H–N (1976): Ed. Burchfield, Robert William. Oxford. O.U.P. The Oxford English Dictionary. Supplement III, O–Scz (1982): Ed. Burchfield, Robert William. Oxford. O.U.P. The Oxford English Dictionary. Supplement IV, Se–Z (1986): Ed. Burchfield, Robert William. Oxford. O.U.P. The Oxford English Dictionary. Second Edition (1989): Prepared by Simpson, John A. / Weiner, Edmund S.C. Oxford. O.U.P.

The Influence of High German on the English Language

51

Pfeffer, Jay Alan (1987): Deutsches Sprachgut im Wortschatz der Amerikaner und Engländer. Vergleichendes Lexikon mit analytischer Einführung. Tübingen. Niemeyer. Pfeffer, Jay Alan / Cannon, Garland (1994): German Loanwords in English. An Historical Dictionary. Cambridge. C.U.P. Pyles, Thomas (1971): The Origins and Development of the English Language. Second edition. San Francisco & Atlanta. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Scheler, Manfred (1977): Der englische Wortschatz (Grundlagen der Anglistik und Amerikanistik 9). Berlin. Schmidt. The Shorter Oxford English Dictonary (1933): Prepared by Little, William / Fowler, Henry Watson / Coulson, Jessie (Senior). Revised and edited by Onions, Charles Talbut. Oxford. O.U.P. Stanforth, Anthony W. (1974): Lexical Borrowing from German since 1933 as Reflected in the British Press. In: Modern Language Review 69, 325–366. Stanforth, Anthony W. (1975): Schein- und Rückentlehnungen aus dem Deutschen im Britisch-Englischen. Zur Entlehnungsgeschichte von blitzkrieg und blitz. In: Neuere Forschungen in Linguistik und Philologie. Aus dem Kreise seiner Schüler Ludwig Erich Schmitt zum 65. Geburtstag gewidmet. Zeitschrift für Dialektologie und Linguistik. Beihefte 13, 114–129. Stanforth, Anthony W. (1996): Deutsche Einflüsse auf den englischen Wortschatz in Geschichte und Gegenwart. Mit einem Beitrag zum Amerikanischen Englisch von Jürgen Eichhoff (Reihe Germanistische Linguistik 165). Tübingen. Niemeyer. Thirkell, Angela (1958): Close Quarters. London. Hamish Hamilton. [Turner, William] (1551): A New Herball. London. [Turner, William] (1548): The Names of Herbes in Greke, Latin, Englishe, Duche and Frenche wyth the Commune Names that Herbaries and Apotecaries Use. London. Wagner, Richard (1872): Über die Benennung ‘Musikdrama’. In: Wolfgang Golther (ed.). Wagner — Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen. Achter Band. Berlin/Leipzig/Wien/Stuttgart. Bong und Co., 302–308. White. Reginald James (1967): A Short History of England. Cambridge. C.U.P.

52

In: Falco Pfalzgraf (Hg.) (2008): Englischer Sprachkontakt in den Varietäten des Deutschen / English in Contact with Varieties of German. Wien, Frankfurt a. M. u.a. Peter Lang Verlag. S. 53– 74.

Alexander ONYSKO (University of Innsbruck/Austria, Department of English)

[email protected]

Divergence with a cause? The systemic integration of anglicisms in German as an indication of the intensity of language contact Abstract This paper can be read as a contribution to the linguistic side of the question of how far the recently increasing contact with English potentially endangers the German language. Since, in linguistic terms, language endangerment is closely related to the intensity of language contact, it is necessary to analyse the types and the effects of English influences on German in view of the social embedding of the contact situation and according to widely observed hierarchies of borrowability. The intensity of language contact is particularly related to the issue of whether anglicisms converge with or diverge from structural schemas of German. In order to answer this question, this study interprets the results of a comprehensive corpus analysis of the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel of the year 2000. Particular focus is put on the analysis of potentially diverging instances of anglicisms to show as to what extent the German language is actually permeated by English influences.

1. Introduction: German and the question of language endangerment The debate on the occurrence of anglicisms in German is couched in the spheres of academic and public discourse. While the former usually takes a fairly objective stance, analyzing linguistic aspects of the contact between English and German, the latter frequently expresses immediate concerns about the (mis)use of English in German: “Es gibt einen Typus des übellaunigen, heimattümelnden Sprachschützers, dem man nicht im Dunklen begegnen möchte. Aber es gibt auch Gründe, im hellen Mittagslicht der aufgeklärten Vernunft Sorge um den Bestand der deutschen Sprache zu empfinden. Warum ist auf Bahnhöfen kein Schalter für Auskünfte, sondern ein Service Point? Was hat der englische GenitivApostroph in Susi’s Häkelstudio zu suchen? Welcher Teufel trieb eine deutsche Wissenschaftsministerin zu einer Kampagne mit dem Motto »Brain

54

Alexander Onysko

up«, was weder auf Deutsch noch auf Englisch Sinn ergibt?” (Die Zeit, 26.07. 2007, ) “Englische Wörter durchsetzen die deutsche Sprache. Kaum ein Werbespruch (Slogan oder Claim), kaum ein Geschäftstreffen (Meeting) kommt ohne die Beschwörung von Future, Results oder einer Sache namens Freedom aus, die man wahrscheinlich nicht mit Freiheit verwechseln soll. Manchmal werden die englischen Ausdrücke falsch verwendet, oft sind sie lächerlich, fast immer unschön.” (Die Zeit, 11/2001, )

Such evaluative comments question the necessity and the reasons for using English terms in a German environment where German synonyms would perfectly well express the same content. In general, arguments against this exaggerated use of English in German revolve around three main issues: 1) The use of English discriminates against people who have little or no knowledge of the language; 2) The use of unnecessary English loans leads to a corruption of German means of expression and will result in an impoverishment of German and, ultimately, loss of the language; 3) The insertion of (pseudo-)English elements embodies a factually empty mode of expression and merely indicates a speaker’s (misguided) wish to appear knowledgeable and modern; These arguments cause some controversy between public discourse, which is often underlyingly inspired by puristic and traditionalistic attitudes, and academic discourse, which frequently tries to take a stance of linguistic objectivism 1 . Thus, public opinion perpetuates a view of language as an invariable, stable property and an epitome of the culture of a nation. Intruders from outside are perceived as possible dangers to the integrity of the property. Academics, on the other hand, tend to argue from the basic view that language appears as a fluctuating and dynamic entity subject to perpetual change. Along the same lines, Spitzmüller (2005) notes that it is difficult to 1

cf. Pfalzgraf (2006) for a detailed analysis of neopuristic tendencies in the discourse of private associations concerned with the German language, of governmentally funded associations of the German language, of individual people aiming to protect the German language, as well as in a selection of articles written by linguists who deal with the issue of anglicisms in German. His findings confirm that private associations and individuals most outspokenly decry the use of English in German by taking recourse to lingua-phobic imagery (e.g. a metaphoric depiction of English as a dangerous body of water flooding the German language). Governmentally-funded associations and, in particular, linguistic publications generally lack puristic depictions concerning the influence of English on German.

Divergence with a Cause?

55

reconcile the academic and public metadiscourses on anglicisms since both perspectives depart from different essential conceptualizations of language. Despite these discursive divisions between academic and public views on the influence of English, the notion of potential language endangerment has also been addressed in academic discourse since it is undeniable that English is increasingly dominating as a language of science and academic research (cf. Ammon 2004) and as the language of international communication; English is by far the most taught and studied language world-wide, and it generally acts as the voice of the socio-economic process of globalization. Such developments can give rise to questions about English language dominance or linguicism (cf. Phillipson 1992). At the same time, these general macroscopic developments of the role of English cloud the diversity of contact scenarios evolving from the interaction of English and individual languages. Thus, for the German language, many studies on anglicisms show that the use of English is restricted to certain domains of discourse, in particular to topics of lifestyle, fashion, entertainment and sport, to the language of advertisement, to certain technical jargons (e.g. computer and IT technology), and, to a lesser extent, also to business and economics. Their use in these varied domains is tied to specific communicative functions ranging from mainly denotational reference (e.g. technical nomenclatures) to primarily connotational associations (e.g. in advertisements). In linguistic terms, language endangerment and language death are the result of intense language contact triggering language shift which is based on the supremacy of one language (speaker community) over the other. Supremacy is not merely a factor of physical (military) and socio-economical dominance but is most effective when speakers of a language decide (supposedly of their own will) to abandon one language for another one. Thus, language attitude in bi/multilingual situations and in scenarios of language contact emerges as a crucial factor which influences the fate of the individual interacting languages. As far as the relationship between intensity of contact and possible language endangerment is concerned, language contact theorists generally agree that contact is most readily perceivable on the lexical level of language while systemic, i.e. grammatical, patterns show greater stability for contact-induced change. This relation is expressed in various hierarchies of borrowability (cf.

56

Alexander Onysko

Field 2002: 117, Curnow 2001) which, even though strongly dependent on socio-cultural factors of contact (cf. Thomason 2008), provide an adequate account of many contact situations. A general synthesis from most easily borrowed to most resistant elements is as follows: open word classes (nouns > verbs/adjective/adverbs) > closed word classes (conjunctions > pronouns > prepositions) > syntactic and morphological patterns (derivational affixes > inflectional affixes). In line with this sequential view of language contact, its level of intensity can be expressed by the type and amount of contact features, from low-level intensity (primarily non-basic lexical borrowings which are integrated regularly into the receptor language) to high-level intensity (the integration of morphological categories and syntactic patterns which lead to a restructuring of the receptor language). 2 Due to the existence of contactinduced change on all (also systemic) levels of language including systematic, high intensity scenarios of contact can translate into cases of possible language endangerment. Applying the notion of intensity of language contact and possible language endangerment to the situation of English influence on German, it is necessary to investigate the type and amount of English units and structures in German. In other words, the crucial point is whether Anglicisms converge with (i.e. conform to its morpho-syntactic schemas) or diverge from German (i.e. deviate from its morpho-syntactic conventions). For instance, anglicisms that fail to inflect for the genitive case (e.g. des Internet, des Stuntman, des Web) might bear some potential to disrupt this inflectional paradigm in German. In order to add to the general discussion of English as a potential source of language endangerment for German, the present paper thus focuses on diverging patterns in the integration of anglicisms in German. The data are drawn from a previous study based on a corpus analysis of the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel from the year 2000 (cf. Onysko 2007). As such, claims about the effects of English in German remain primarily restricted to this specific genre of the language, but the analysis provides a general framework that can be applied to other uses of the language.

2

Cf. Thomason 2001: 70–71 for a model of diverse language contact scenarios reflecting intensity of contact.

Divergence with a Cause?

57

2. Potentially divergent types of English influence in German Before an overview of the diverging types in the corpus of Der Spiegel can be given, the question arises of which kind of English influence partakes in the potentially system-abrasive processes of language contact. In a nutshell, only processes that involve the usage of English form-meaning units and those based on form-meaning similarities between English and German bear potential for changing the face of German. Thus, the following phenomena play a role in the discussion of the implications of convergence vs. divergence as a measure of intensity of language contact: 1) Borrowing and codeswitching of lexical and grammatical units 2) Instances of interference. This type of influence is cognitively grounded in network theory through activation of similar nodes, i.e. the existence of similar form-meaning pairs in two languages can lead to partial transfers between these languages (cf. Paradis 2004). Such similarities can concern various aspects of language such as lexical-semantic changes of given forms and in the increase in usage frequency of possible structural, grammatical, and discourse patterns based on an Source Language (SL) model. In House and Rehbein (2004), for example, the hypothesis is put forward that genre specific English clause structures are mapped onto German translations. In addition, common pathways of contact-induced grammaticalization can exploit functional similarities between languages in contact combined with universal image schemas. For example, the grammaticalization of the motion schema [X goes to Y] for future reference, as in the English ‘be going to’ future gave rise to a similar grammatical replication in Pennsylvania German involving the verb ‘geh’ (Heine and Kuteva 2008: 67; cf. also Heine and Kuteva 2005 for a fuller description of contactinduced grammaticalization). Since interference is based on given form-meaning units, it mostly impinges on the language by strengthening the usage frequency of certain patterns, and it can lead to slight changes in lexical and grammatical meanings of given forms. These changes do not appear to have a deeper effect in terms of restructuring the surface of the language. In a similar fashion, contactinduced conceptual changes can occur via lexical translation as in the classical case of loan translation, or calque, e.g. German immergrün following English evergreen (cf. Carstensen and Busse, AWB). As long as the creation of source

58

Alexander Onysko

language (SL) concepts in the receptor language (RL) draws from lexical material and combinatorial schemas of the RL, the conceptual expansion of the RL does not cause any disturbances on the formal/structural level. Due to the fact that English and German compounds are formed along the same structural lines, literal translations from English remain inconspicuous in German. If, however, formal equivalence in the translation of complex terms is retained in the RL, as in the example of the loan translation ferrovia in Italian from German Eisenbahn, the alien schema of the SL could potentially trigger a more fundamental change in the RL. In the event of massive calquing from German into Italian, a shift from a prepositional phrasal construction (e.g. *via del ferro) to a German right headed compound construction could be stimulated. This example of German loan translation in Italian indicates that the types of contact phenomena relevant for a classification along the continuum from converging to diverging integration into an RL are dependent on linguistic-typological factors of the languages in contact. While linguistic-typological factors constitute the basic frame for the instantiation and effects of language contact phenomena, it has to be emphasized again, in line with repeated claims by Thomason, that social factors of the contact situation can overrule any linguistic probabilities (Thomason and Kaufmann 1988: 4, restated in Thomason 2008: 43). For the influence of English on German, the macro-social parameters allow for a general classification of the contact situation, which is also indicative of the expected overall impact of English on German. First of all, the contact scenario of English and German can be classified as remote contact. Crucial to this categorization is the fact that contact is not based on direct speaker interaction but is primarily mediated through print and audiovisual media (newspapers, journals, TV, radio, Internet). As the name implies, a remote contact scenario is based on a non-immediate, distant relation between the languages in contact, and so mitigated influences (such as lexical borrowing) are expected. The remoteness is underlined by the lack of institutional need for English in the German-speaking environment. Thus, in everyday life of large parts of the German-speaking community, the use of English is at best restricted to an ancillary role as a main learner language, and it can be used as a language of international communication in some selected contexts. In Coetsem’s terms (cf. 2000), the influence of English on German qualifies for a stable contact scenario where the RL (German)

Divergence with a Cause?

59

remains the dominant language. This is a scenario of RL-agentivity, which induces borrowing, in contrast to SL-agentivity, which causes the imposition of SL structures (and the whole language as such) onto the RL. However, increasing knowledge of and familiarity with the English language perpetuated by earlier and more intense contact with the language in the educational system (e.g. the introduction of English classes in primary schools in Austria) and by more contexts of receptive exposure to the language (e.g. English radio and TV programmes, the Internet, computer games, English books and magazines) promote the level of at least unbalanced bilingualism of German speakers in first language German and second language English. So, for the future, one can assume that the integration of English into German discourse will no longer pose substantial communicative barriers among the younger generations. These two macro-social conditions form the foundation for corresponding metaphorical depictions of the contact situation. One the one hand, geographical distance of the languages (and speakers) in contact evokes the image of English acting as an external source of influence on German. In this sense, English and German are conceptualized as two separate containers, and contact arises via the transfer of English contents (as discrete units) into the container of German along connecting pathways of contact (e.g. media). This metaphor of LANGUAGE CONTACT IS TRANSFER OF ELEMENTS FROM SOURCE CONTAINER TO RECIPIENT CONTAINER is based on the verbal action schema of the social act of giving which involves an agent, an object, and a recipient. The mapping of the give-schema onto language contact has initially defined the perception of language contact and led to the establishment of concomitant terminological concepts in the field (e.g. borrowing, loanword, transmission, source language, receptor language, and replication). On the other hand, the awareness that the use of English in German emerges from the psycholinguistic reality of bilingualism translates into metaphorical images of nested languages in a superordinate container (the human mind) or, from a more interactional perspective, the intertwining of both languages in a shared network structure contained in the human mind. The conceptualization of language contact as a symptom of bi/multilingualism has inspired its own models and terminology for describing contact phenomena, e.g. insertion, alternation, congruent lexicalization (cf. Muysken 2000), matrix lan-

60

Alexander Onysko

guage and embedded language (cf. Myers-Scotton 1993, 2002), and general concepts such as codeswitching, code-mixing, and interference. As the macro-social conditions of language contact between English and German above show, both metaphorical depictions have some currency for describing the current influence of English on German. Accordingly, a definition of the term anglicism as a token of English influence can unify theoretical concepts from both views. In detail, these are borrowing, codeswitching, interference, and the productive use of English units in German, e.g. pseudo anglicisms and hybrid anglicisms. In general terms, an anglicism can be defined as any instance of an English lexical, structural or phonological unit and by extension English behavioural — pragmatic and discourse patterns in German that can be formally related to English (cf. Onysko 2007: 90). Since anglicisms as borrowings, codeswitches, and instances of productive use are formally conspicuous in German, they are relevant for an analysis along the lines of convergence vs. divergence to the system of the German language.

3. Converging and diverging anglicisms in a corpus study of Der

Spiegel 2000 3 As long as there is a lack of automated means 4 for detecting English loan influences in German, the segment of the language investigated for the types and integrational behaviour of anglicisms will necessarily remain restricted. In addition, far-reaching claims of the spread and impact of anglicisms would have to take into account both written and spoken language from different genres and text types and among different speaker communities and age groups in society. The first approaches that try to draw conclusions from mixed corpora of written and spoken language have been undertaken (cf. Glahn 2002); so far, however, spoken discourse has mostly been tied to formal registers close to a written form such as TV-news and serials. A few restrictions also apply to the data used for this study. First of all, Der Spiegel reflects a written, journalistic style of language use, which is characterized by its inventiveness and strife for originality. Thematically, Der Spiegel covers the following areas: Germany, business, sport, the media, soci3

The data in this section is based on Onysko (2007).

4

Cf. Alex 2008 for a recent advance in the generation of software which automatically detects English inclusions in German texts.

Divergence with a Cause?

61

ety, foreign affairs, science / technology, and culture. It thus extends over quite a broad range of topics and thus provides a glimpse on the use of anglicisms in different domains. Since Der Spiegel is one of the most popular newsmagazines in German-speaking areas, it also potentially reflects and sets trends in current language use. The corpus under investigation is based on all the issues of the year 2000 (53 issues), which were systematically searched for anglicisms with the help of Wordsmith Tools. Proper nouns, a set of borderline anglicisms (e.g. internationalisms, and terms of fuzzy etymology), and, most crucially, advertisements were excluded from the analysis so that the types and use of anglicisms were determined in a general segment of standard written German. Due to the less fleeting and more formal nature of written language, any diverging forms of anglicisms from expected patterns of morpho-syntactic integration can thus be investigated as potential indicators of more pronounced systemic changes in the language. Against this methodological background, the questions arise as to which types and to what extent anglicisms indeed diverge from the norm, and how serious this divergence appears in linguistic terms. In general, the number of anglicisms in this portion of the German language is very small. From a total of 287,301 types of words (5,202,583 tokens), anglicisms amount to 16,663 types (5·8%) and 57,591 tokens (1·11%). The marginal numerical impact is underlined by the fact that merely 5% of all the anglicisms occur more than ten times while the vast majority of 71% are mentioned only once in the year 2000. The low rate of recurrence of individual anglicisms can be explained by two related reasons. First of all, anglicisms constitute non-basic content words which, in contrast to function words, generally have a comparably low frequency in language. Secondly, the high number of single-instance anglicisms is a token of the productive use of a core of English terms in German. Thus, hybrid compounding involving a German word and a common anglicism (e.g. Schadenfreude-Show, Überlebensshow ‘survival show’, Rechenpower ‘calculation power’, Familienmanager ‘family manager’) is by far the most productive process, accounting for about 84% of all single-instance anglicisms in the corpus. If the distribution of anglicisms according to parts of speech among the more established anglicisms (token frequency 3+) is considered, the following values can be found: nouns 2,383 types (36,035 tokens), adjectives 156 types (2,015 tokens), verbs 152 types (2,066 tokens), adverbs and other 88

62

Alexander Onysko

types (1464 tokens). This cline from nouns, with by far the largest share of anglicisms, to adjectives/verbs and then to adverbs and other types (e.g. discourse markers as in yeah, well, okay) conforms with hierarchies of borrowability (cf. section 1) and, thus, emphasizes the low intensity and nondisruptive effects of the contact scenario between English and German. This is further confirmed by the marginal overall occurrence of anglicisms in the corpus and their low frequency of recurrence. The fact that anglicisms frequently partake in the productive process of compounding is a token of their readiness for integration into German. According to these values of contact in Der Spiegel 2000, the conclusion can be drawn that anglicisms do not appear to be a source of language endangerment for German. In order to substantiate this observation, however, the quantitative results need to be supported by qualitative evidence, i.e. by investigating the extent to which anglicisms converge with or diverge from German morpho-syntactic features. To search for possible cases of divergence, the inflectional behaviour of anglicisms is analyzed in their usage contexts. Indeed, the morpho-syntactic integration of nominal, verbal, and adjectival anglicisms turns out to be highly convergent from German conventions. Basically, Coetsem’s postulate of “borrowed lexical nucleus + adapted flexive” (2000: 141), which is typical of the integration of loanwords in contact scenarios of RL agentivity (i.e. contact is stable and non-disruptive of the receptor language), applies to the vast majority of anglicisms when they are used in the respective German constructions. Thus, the following generalizations for the individual parts of speech emerge from the corpus. Verbal anglicisms: The majority of verbal anglicisms coexist with a nominal counterpart: e.g. testen, starten, filmen, jetten, dealen, recyceln, designen, managen, mailen, brunchen, and powern. With the exception of jetten ‘to fly by jet, to move very fast’ and brunchen ‘to eat brunch’, which are derived from nominal anglicisms in German, the verbal anglicisms are probably doubly motivated as direct verbal borrowing or denominal derivation from model anglicisms. As the examples above show, verbal anglicisms regularly inflect for the infinitive and apart from a handful of exceptions (see below) they also take regular person/number/tense suffixes, e.g. er erjobbt ‘he reaches [a goal] by

Divergence with a Cause?

63

way of a job’, sie raven und rocken ‘they rave and rock’. Interestingly, the inflectional integration of verbal anglicisms follows a cline of usage propensity from infinitive forms > participles > person/number > tense (imperfect) inflection. Thus, verbal anglicisms most frequently occur in the infinitive while there was no instance of simple past tense (“Präteritum”) usage in the corpus. This cline is related to hierarchies of borrowability as it is indicative of the tendency that the amount of grammatical information (marking) influences the likelihood of the integration of contact features into the native system. A further indicator of stability is the regular integration of verbal anglicisms in the derivational system of verbal prefixation (creating separable prefix verbs): e.g. abscannen, durchgestylten, einloggen. Non-integrated English verb forms are basic verbs (e.g. run, go, love, make, do, drive, are, can, buy) which remain almost (see below) exclusively tied to embedded English language islands in codeswitched passages of the German texts. Adjectival anglicisms: The generalizations for adjectival anglicisms that can be made on the basis of the corpus indicate that they are generally neatly integrated into the German system and that their passage into the language follows a cline from usage in non-inflected contexts to regular integration into German morphological schemas. Thus, predicative adjectives are more frequent than attributive. Some of the most common ones are: fit, cool, high, new, old, fair, top, safe, clean, hip, easy, smart, clever. In addition, Der Spiegel 2000 does not contain any attributive adjectives without featuring their predicative counterparts. This confirms the assumption that non-inflected predicative use precedes inflected attributive occurrences of anglicisms in German. When adjectival anglicisms assume attributive function, they regularly agree with their nouns in gender, person, and number. This also holds true for a variety of participial adjectives derived from well-integrated verbal anglicisms, as in boomende ‘booming’, recycelte ‘recycled’, gepiercte ‘pierced’, and ausgepowerte ‘expend its power, exhausted’. The only exceptions to this regular process are busy, happy, sexy, and trendy, which defy attributive inflections for phonological reasons, as Peter Eisenberg points out: “simple stems with a second unstressed open full syllable in German generally avoid a naked reduced syllable following them” (2004: 130). Finally, the corpus contains some adjectival anglicisms that are derived with frequent German adjectival

64

Alexander Onysko

suffixes from common nominal and verbal anglicisms as in filmisch, trendig, jazzig, trainierbar, stressfrei, poppig, and spleenig. Adverbial and other anglicisms: In general, adverbs form a rather small class in the German lexicon and productive processes for generating new forms are sparse (the semi-suffix -weise constitutes the most common pattern of derivation). This is why it is not surprising that there are only a few adverbial anglicisms integrated in German discourse. The only ones in the corpus are nonstop, live, online, and offline, which have become regular items in German. The majority of English adverbs in Der Spiegel 2000, such as just, never, really, daily, ready, and again, are contained in codeswitching as in the following example, taken from an article about modern life as a single person: 1)

Da heißt es tapfer sein und immer daran denken: It’s your life, it’s your choice. Just do it. (10/91)

The example also shows that other English terms in the corpus, particularly function words such as pronouns, conjunctions, and articles, are tied to codeswitched segments or lexicalized phrasal constructions which are inserted into the German texts as embedded English language islands (following Myers-Scotton 1993). This leaves a handful of English discourse markers that have gained some currency in German among the marginal types of anglicisms: okay, sorry, hey, and wow. The corpus-based generalizations among the numerically smaller types of verbal, adjectival, adverbial, and other anglicisms highlight the regular, non-system abrasive integration of English borrowings into German. Morpho-syntactically, the anglicisms essentially behave as other German items and show a tendency to prefer usage contexts that do not demand inflectional integration. Shifting the attention to nominal anglicisms, the question arises whether integration into the most permeable layer of the German lexicon exhibits similar degrees of stability. Nominal anglicisms: In general, German noun stems bear markers for plural, genitive case singular (only masculine and neuter nouns), and dative plural. As extensively treated elsewhere (cf. Carstensen 1980, Gregor 1983, Onysko 2006, 2007,

Divergence with a Cause?

65

Yang 1990), gender assignment occurs as a necessary systemic reflex when nominal anglicisms are used in German discourse. Observations based on the data in Der Spiegel 2000 indicate that avoidance strategies and gender variation appear minimal and that gender is assigned in line with conscious selection (i.e. choice of gender in coherence to overt translational equivalents) and unconscious cognitive schemas (i.e. phonological, conceptual, and morphological stimuli) (cf. Onysko 2006). As far as dative plural root inflection is concerned, all instances in the corpus converge completely to the paradigmatic conventions (–n suffixation), e.g. Computern, Filmen, Managern, Reportern, Trainern. These examples demonstrate that usages demanding dative plural are limited to wellestablished anglicisms and so dative plural inflection is generally a rare companion of anglicisms. The real reason for the lack of dative plural inflection, however, is related to patterns of pluralization. While virtually all anglicisms 5 ending in –er (188 types among the nouns occurring 3 times and more often in the corpus) fall in line with the schema of zero plural suffixation of German nouns in –er, the majority (60%) take a plural –s suffix, which does not change in the dative plural. While, on first sight, –s plural suffixation appears as a potential systemic influence induced by wholesale borrowing of English elements together with their language specific convention of pluralization, –s plural can also be explained from the perspective of German. Thus, –s attaches as a regular German plural suffix to nouns not typically pluralized such as proper names (e.g. die Maiers, die Müllers), various types of abbreviations (e.g. die VWs, die Össis ‘the Austrians’), and foreign words (die Autos, die Services). This general function of –s plural in German has led Marcus, Brinkmann, and Clahsen (1995) and Pinker and Prince (1994) to the conclusion that –s plural is in fact the underlying regular plural suffix of German. A recent study by Bartke, Rösler, Streb and Wiese (2005) has slightly attenuated this claim since other plural schemas, particularly –e suffixation, also exhibit comparable priming effects. The corpus data in Der Spiegel 2000 shows that anglicisms most readily fall in line with German zero plural for nouns ending in –er, and 5

The only exceptions in the corpus, Global Players (Global Player) and Left-overs can be explained in the following way: variation between Global Players and Global Player is based on direct borrowing of the English model, and, in later uses in the corpus, it is reanalyzed towards the German pattern of zero suffix pluralization for nouns ending in –er. Due to the non-morphemic status of –er in over, Left-overs remains in its original form and has not been reanalyzed into a singular noun.

66

Alexander Onysko

that the overall prevalence of –s plural is doubly motivated by English influence and by extending the native regular pattern of pluralization 6 . Thus –s plural in anglicisms can also be interpreted as a further instance of English borrowings converging with German morpho-syntactic conventions. This leaves genitive case suffixation as the only paradigm where nominal anglicisms show some variation to standard norms. From a total of 181 types of anglicisms that are used in the genitive case, a total of 28% resist, at least partly, regular genitive root inflection. With the exception of Boss Æ Bosses, all the anglicisms terminating in an alveolar fricative [s] and [z], resist –s suffixation: Business, Cyberspace, E-Commerce, Hooliganismus, Jazz, Service, and Tennis. However, as the exception indicates, word final alveolar fricatives are not a general reason for blocking genitive suffixation in native terms (cf. das Haus Æ des Hauses, der Fluss Æ des Flusses), where epenthetic [e] and [E] creates a bridge for genitive –s. If anglicisms are highlighted by quotation marks as special insertions in German articles of Der Spiegel 2000, they generally defy genitive inflection, as in des „Branding“, des „Crash“, des „Shareholder-Value“, and des „SnowFunPark“. A few anglicisms freely vary between proper root inflection and zero marking as in des Crash — des Crashs, des Entertainment — des Entertainments, des Laptop — des Laptops, and des Underdog — des Underdogs. Also the most frequent anglicism in the corpus, Internet, shows variation between marked and non-marked usages. The fact that earlier usages of Internet in Der Spiegel favour regular –s inflection while later occurrences tend towards divergent zero marking refutes any claims that exotic and new borrowings initially resist genitive inflection and that only later, once integrated and used frequently, they will accommodate to German conventions. The lack of genitive case marking in other well-established anglicisms (Controlling, Glamour, Hightech, Rap, Recycling, Shuttle, Stuntman, Techno, Web, and Weltcup) confirm that resistance of anglicisms to genitive root inflection is not a question of the acceptance and dispersion of anglicisms in the German lexicon. Instead, possible indices to explain this diverging morphosyntactic behaviour lie in the German case paradigm. First of all, the German

6

Even though –e and –[e]n plurals are widespread plural suffixes in the German lexicon, their occurrence is minimal with anglicisms. From 603 types of plural nouns only 5% form their plural with –e (reducible to the following types): Bosse, Boykotte (Boykotts), Filme, Remixe, and Sketche, while –[e]n plural is represented in 1% of all types, Farmen, Lobbyisten, Interviewten, and Boxen.

Divergence with a Cause?

67

case system exhibits a certain amount of syncretism (cf. Bittner 2001). Genitive case in masculine and neuter nouns, however, is doubly marked, first of all by the preceding determiner and secondly by –s root inflection. So, in comparison with other cases, genitive in masculine and neuter nouns is overspecified since, from a referential point of view, the determiner would suffice to unambiguously indicate the genitive. As such, the variance and lack of genitive root inflection in anglicisms does not disrupt the genitive case paradigm but reduces its amount of overspecification. So far, divergence in nominal genitive inflection has emerged as the only morpho-syntactic category in which anglicisms deviate from standard German conventions and could thus promote a change in the German system. Even this example of divergence has some systemic grounding since it follows a natural pathway of language change as simplification and paradigmatic levelling. In order to complete the picture of morpho-syntactic divergence of anglicisms in the corpus, verbal and adjectival anglicisms once more become the focus of attention. From all the usages of verbal anglicisms in Der Spiegel 2000, only a few deviations from standard norms can be found. These concern third person –s inflection and participle formation, in particular the verbal forms meets, goes, and sells, which occur in their English form in a variety of simple catch phrases: 2)

meets: Casanova meets Mozart, Kunst meets Kitsch (‘art meets kitsch’), Literatur meets Lebenswelt (‘literature meets reality’), Politik meets Internet, Tango meets Barock goes: Buddha goes Business, Heidi goes Hollywood, Rtl goes online sells: Sex sells, Stil sells (‘style sells’)

These non-integrated English verbs share certain characteristics. First of all, they form the nucleus of a plain clause construction of the type A verb (B), which, in a few cases, is emphasized by alliterative nouns. Due to their nature as non-established English elements 7 in German, their verb senses in7

Some authors (cf. Pütz 1993: 191) would label such instantaneous borrowings ad-hoc loans or nonce loans/borrowings. Since such forms share the crucial characteristic of spontaneous integration of a Language A item in Language B discourse, they come critically close to instances of codeswitching and could also be labelled as such. In detail, the term ad-hoc loan describes the aspect of momentary mental selec-

68

Alexander Onysko

volve generic, abstract actions. So, meets refers to an imaginary ‘encounter’ between antonymically tinted concepts (e.g. art and kitsch, literature and reality, tango and baroque). Goes transcends from its literal sense of ‘movement’ and refers to a change of state in the agent while sells radiates an abstract sense of ‘vending’, which an equivalent reflexive verb construction in German (sich verkaufen) would fail to achieve in such a straightforward manner (cp. Stil verkauft sich gut). The reason why these verbs retain their English inflections and do not follow the German verbal paradigm is related to the fact that meet, go, and sell remain tied to these specific uses and do not occur as autonomous verbal borrowings in other contexts. They thus emerge as codeswitched units bearing the specific stylistic function of forming the nucleus of simple catch phrases, and as such do not indicate any more profound disruption of the German inflectional system. Apart from this stylistically driven retention of –s inflection, participle formation diverges from the German norm in the following instances: 3)

Ich bin einfach inzwischen müde und erschöpft davon, entertained zu werden. (9/237)

4)

Aber die audience hat das alles von Anfang an auch supported. (5/122)

5)

Es gibt einen Funpark am Kitzsteinhorn, Half- und Quarterpipes für Snowboarder. Es wird gecarved, gecruised und gepowdered. (47/213)

6)

Und dann wird, im Office, den lieben langen Tag designt und gecancelt, gelayouted und downgeloaded und mit Genehmigung des neuen Duden sogar gehighlighted. (44/240)

Basically, the participial anglicisms in (3) – (6) mirror German schemas of regular (weak) past participle formation. If an anglicism is interpreted as consisting of a non-separable prefix and a stem, the participial suffix is added, as in designt, entertained, and supported. Verbal anglicisms that are analyzed as simple roots and as separable prefix verbs (e.g. download) take full participial circumfixes as in gecarved, gecruised, gepowdered, gelayouted, downgeloaded, and gehighlighted. Apart from designt and gecancelt, howtion essential for codeswitching and does not describe a different basic process of language contact. Its focus on the aspect of mental selection renders it yet more appropriate than the term nonce loan/borrowing, which represents a mere subjective comment on the usage frequency of an item that is, in fact, variable from a diachronic point of view.

Divergence with a Cause?

69

ever, the participial suffix retains its English graphemic shape. This divergence seems to be based on mainly two grounds. First of all, in anglicisms ending in an alveolar stop [t, d], the English participial suffix is formally close to its German counterpart. The resulting graphemic difference of English vs. German is levelled to [t] in German due to “Auslautverhärtung” (final devoicing). While this formal similarity of the participial constructions might explain why understanding is not necessarily hampered by the English suffixes, it fails to conclusively show why the German form has not been selected instead. A partial answer to this question might lie in the fact that the original English form highlights the extraordinary status of the English verbs as exoticisms and not fully accepted items in the German lexicon. This would speak for an interpretation of entertained and supported as direct insertions in their German clauses, and it would mark the verbal anglicisms in gecarved, gecruised, gepowdered, gelayouted, downgeloaded, and gehighlighted as similarly exotic English units in German. With the potential exception of *highlighten, however, the other verbal anglicisms seem to have some usage currency in the jargon of snowboarders and in general computational terminology in German. So, an explanation for the occurrence of participial –ed along the lines of marking nonaccepted verbal anglicisms only provides feeble support for the argument. Yet in the context of diverging adjectival participles, the claim is revived that morpho-syntactically non-adapted forms appear as direct, exceptional insertions of English participles in German. This is evident in the following predicative, attributive, and adverbial usages of participial anglicisms in the corpus: 7)

educated: Manchmal sage ich auch, ich bin ein „educated Kanakster“. (47/69)

8)

gefaked: Ihre Englischkenntnisse sind sozusagen gefaked. (44/241)

9)

oldfashioned: Denglisch nennen das die oldfashioned Quengler. (42/160)

10) overdosed: Wenn du overdosed bist, dann verraffst du halt irgendwelche Sachen. (27/208)

70

Alexander Onysko

11) relaxed: …beginnen wir das neue Jahrtausend ganz relaxed im Sitzen… (32/119) 12) sophisticated: …vermittle dem Käufer eine Botschaft: „Du bist sophisticated. Du bist cool. Du bist reich“. (24/100) 13) stoned: Aufmerksam wurde er, als die ersten seiner Schützlinge „völlig stoned durch die Gegend liefen“. (35/109) 14) stonewashed: …Klischees von stonewashed Jeanshemden… (20/118) 15) unplugged: …unplugged spielte. (21/105) In all of these examples, the participial anglicisms are integrated into the German phrases wholesale as unanalyzed units and do not derive from borrowed verbal anglicisms. While the occurrences in (8), (10), (11), (12), (13), and (15) represent predicative and adverbial uses and so do not take any agreement, the attributive function of the participles in (7), (9), and (14) would demand inflectional marking if comparable German terms were inserted. The resistance of these anglicisms to any inflection highlights, on the one hand, their exotic status in German and, on the other hand, renders the construction closer to a compound structure. To sum up the discussion on morpho-syntactically divergent anglicisms in the newsmagazine Der Spiegel (2000), it is evident that the overall amount of divergence is minimal compared with regularly inflected forms. What appear to be good examples of deviation from standard German schemas, such as –s plural nominal inflection, the retention of third person –s in meets, goes, and sells, and participial adjectives retaining their English form, in fact turn out to conform to already given schemas of pluralization, occur as stylistically loaded, isolated codeswitches, or represent non-derived, exceptional borrowings. Indeed the only paradigms where anglicisms diverge, at least partly, from German conventions are genitive case inflection and, to a marginal extent, verbal participle formation. While the former travels along a common pathway of paradigmatic language change, the latter defies any conclusive description but seems partly influenced by formal similarities between English and German participial suffixes and by the fact that the English suffix can mark the anglicism as an instance of an isolated, non-established borrowing.

Divergence with a Cause?

71

4. Conclusion: focussing on the vitality of German Overall, the investigation of a substantial corpus of standard written German in the newsmagazine Der Spiegel shows that, even though palpable in the forms of lexical borrowings and codeswitched segments, the impact of English on German remains numerically small and does not conflict with German morpho-syntactic conventions of the language. The prevalence of lexical borrowings and their distribution among different types of speech mirrors predictions of borrowing hierarchies and emphasizes that the remote language contact situation between English and German is indeed one of a very low level of intensity. In Thomason’s terms (2001: 70), the observed contact features would qualify for a level one “casual contact” scenario, which, in Coetsem’s characterization (cf. 2000) describes stable language contact keeping the RL basically intact. The evidence in Der Spiegel indeed emphasizes the vitality of the German language which integrates anglicisms according to its structural schemas and uses English borrowings productively in conjunction with German items to create new and stylistically marked ways of lexical reference in the language. The high degree of convergence to German morpho-syntactic conventions compared with isolated instances of structural divergence, which appear as a consequence of paradigmatically induced language change and in the form of exceptional participle formation, thus defy any claims for possible language endangerment from a linguistic point of view. This, however, is not to deny that the current role of English as the major medium of international communication and as the main learner language in German speaking areas will continue to foster bilingualism and, thus, potentially intensify the occurrence of language contact phenomena (in particular code-switching). Similarly, it cannot be denied that certain segments of German (especially commercial language use) feature a noticeable amount of English and that individual habits of using English ornamentally in German discourse can cause strong reactions in the larger speaker community. This is why it seems vital for the future of the German language to promote a conscious sense of plurilingualism that stimulates general appreciation of language diversity and provides opportunities for increasing metalinguistic skills. These could serve as guidance for a conscious choice of language. After all, the attitudes of speakers are decisive for the fate of a language.

72

Alexander Onysko

References Ammon, Ulrich (2004): German as an international language of the sciences — recent past and present. In: Gardt, Andreas / Hüppauf, Bernd (eds). Globalization and the Future of German. Berlin and New York. De Gruyter, 157– 72. Bartke, Susanne / Rösler, Frank / Streb, Judith / Wiese, Richard (2005): An ERPstudy of German ‘irregular’ morphology. Journal of Neurolinguistics 18/1, 29–55. Beatrice, Alex (2008): Automatic Detection of English Inclusions in Mixedlingual Data with an Application to Parsing. Diss. University of Edinburgh. Edinburgh. Bittner, Dagmar (2001): The Definite Articles in German. What are the Features Creating an Underspecified Paradigm? In Rauch, Irmengard / Carr, Gerald F. (eds). New insights in Germanic linguistics II. New York. Peter Lang, 1– 21. Carstensen, Broder (1980): Das Genus englischer Fremd- und Lehnwörter im Deutschen. In Viereck, Wolfgang (ed.). Studien zum Einfluss der englischen Sprache auf das Deutsche. Tübingen. Narr, 37–76. Carstensen, Broder / Busse, Ulrich (1993, 1994, 1996): Anglizismen Wörterbuch (AWB). 3 Vols. Berlin and New York. De Gruyter. Coetsem, Frans Van (2000): A General and Unified Theory of the Transmission Process in Language Contact. Heidelberg. Winter. Curnow, Timothy Jowan (2001): What Language Features Can Be ‘Borrowed’? In Aikhenvald, Alexandra / Dixon, Robert M.W. (eds). Areal Diffusion and Genetic Inheritance. Oxford. O.U.P., 412–36. Die verkaufte Sprache. Die Zeit, 26.07.2007. . Eisenberg, Peter (2004): German as an Endangered Language? In Gardt, Andreas / Hüppauf, Bernd (eds). Globalization and the Future of German. Berlin, New York. De Gruyter, 121–38. Field, Fredric W. (2002): Linguistic Borrowing in Bilingual Contexts. Amsterdam and Philadelphia. John Benjamins. Glahn, Richard (2002): Der Einfluss des Englischen auf gesprochene deutsche Gegenwartssprache. Frankfurt am Main. Peter Lang. Gregor, Bernd (1983): Genuszuordnung: Das Genus englischer Lehnwörter im Deutschen. Tübingen. Niemeyer. Heine, Bernd, Tania Kuteva (2008): Constraints on Contact-Induced Linguistic Change. Journal of Language Contact. Thema (2). .

Divergence with a Cause?

73

Heine, Bernd / Kuteva, Tania (2005): Language Contact and Grammatical Change. Cambridge. C.U.P. House, Juliane / Rehbein, Jochen (eds) (2004): Multilingual Communication. Hamburg Studies on Multilingualism Vol. 3. Amsterdam and Philadelphia. John Benjamins. Marcus, Gary / Brinkmann, Ursula / Clahsen, Harald (1995) German Inflection: The Exception That Proves the Rule. Cognitive Psychology 29, 189–256. Muysken, Pieter (2000): Bilingual Speech. Cambridge. C.U.P. Myers-Scotton, Carol (2002): Contact Linguistics: Bilingual Encounters and Grammatical Outcomes. Oxford. O.U.P. Myers-Scotton, Carol (1993): Duelling Languages: Grammatical Structure in Code-Switching. Oxford. Clarendon. Onysko, Alexander (2007): anglicisms in German: Borrowing, Lexical Productivity, and Written Codeswitching. Berlin and New York. De Gruyter. Onysko, Alexander (2006): Gender Assignment of anglicisms in German. Interdisciplinary Journal of Germanic Linguistics and Semiotic Analysis (IJGLSA) 11/2, 163–93. Paradis, Michel (2004): A Neurolinguistic Theory of Bilingualism. Amsterdam, Philadelphia. Benjamins. Pfalzgraf, Falco (2006): Neopurismus in Deutschland nach der Wende. Frankfurt am Main. Peter Lang. Pinker, Steven / Prince, Alan (1994): Regular and Irregular Morphology and the Psychological Status of Rules of Grammar. In Lima, Susan D. / Corrigan, Roberta L. / Iverson, Gregory K. (eds). The Reality of Linguistic Rules. Amsterdam and Philadelphia. John Benjamins, 321–51. Phillipson, Robert (1992): Linguistic Imperialism. Oxford. O.U.P. Pütz, Martin (1993): Bilinguale Sprecherstrategien: Code-switching, Integration und ad-hoc Entlehnungen. In Eichinger, Ludwig M. / Raith, Joachim (eds). Sprachkontakte — Konstanten und Variablen. Bochum. Brockmeyer, 181– 95. Scott, Mike. Wordsmith Tools. 4th version. Oxford. O.U.P. Schicksal Denglisch. Die Zeit 11/2001. Spitzmüller, Jürgen (2005): Metasprachdiskurse: Einstellungen zu Anglizismen und ihre wissenschaftliche Rezeption. Berlin, New York. De Gruyter. Thomason, Sarah Grey (2008): Social and Linguistic Factors as Predictors of Contact-Induced Change. Journal of Language Contact. Thema (2). .

74

Alexander Onysko

Thomason, Sarah G. (2001): Language Contact. Edinburgh. Edinburgh University Press. Thomason, Sarah G., / Kaufman, Terrence (1988): Language Contact, Creolization, and Genetic Linguistics. Berkeley and Los Angeles. University of California Press. Yang, Wenliang (1990): Anglizismen im Deutschen: am Beispiel des Nachrichtenmagazines Der Spiegel. Tübingen. Niemeyer.

In: Falco Pfalzgraf (Hg.) (2008): Englischer Sprachkontakt in den Varietäten des Deutschen / English in Contact with Varieties of German. Wien, Frankfurt a. M. u.a. Peter Lang Verlag. S. 75-94.

David YEANDLE (King’s College London/UK, Department of German) [email protected]

English Loan Words and their Gender in German — An Etymological Perspective Abstract Studies of the assignment of gender to English loan words in German have paid scant attention to the preservation of the etymological gender of the loan word. This has been a criterion only where a clear cognate, with gender, has already existed in German, and is referred to as the ‘cognate principle’. (Chan 2004) Our present investigation looks behind the English loans, which in many cases come ultimately from French, Latin, or Greek, for the ‘hidden’ gender in those languages (or in the case of native vocabulary in Germanic) and tests, on the basis of a small corpus of vocabulary, whether the etymological gender is adopted for the loan word in German. The results of this empirical study show that in a majority of cases the ‘etymological principle’ is at least one possible explanation amongst others for the assignment of gender in German.

1. Loans in Early German In my inaugural lecture, I was concerned with showing how German nouns borrowed from different sources — Greek, Latin, French, and English — were frequently, to coin a phrase, ‘oversexed’, inasmuch as some showed more than one gender. (Yeandle 2007) This was as true in the early periods of the language, Old and Middle High German, where the principal influences were Latin and French, as it is in the present day, where the principal influence is English. German, being a ‘gendered’ language, upon borrowing a noun from another language, must assign a gender for use in German, together with morphology for the expression of case and number. (Chan 2004: 9) It is a simple assumption that, when borrowing a noun from another gendered language, German will adopt the gender of the noun in that language, e.g. das Argument < Lat. argumentum (neut.); der Chirurg < Lat. chirurgus (masc.) < Gk. χειρουργός; der Preis < MHG der prîs < OF le pris < Lat. pretium (neut.); die Magie < late Lat. magia (fem.) < Gk. μᾰγεία (fem.); die

76

David Yeandle

Serviette < Fr. la serviette. All of these loans to German follow the gender of the loaning language, in some cases via an intermediary, as in the transmission from Greek to Latin, above. However, as we saw in the case of variantgender nouns, and in other cases too, the assumption that the gender of the loaning language will be transferred with the noun, is in certain cases erroneous. Greek κυριακόν (neut.) gave rise to OHG kirihha (fem.), NHG die Kirche; there are competing suggestions in explanation of the gender change, my own being the analogy of κυριακόν with the oblique cases of the weak feminine declension (OHG zunga — zungûn), producing via back formation a nominative form in and hence a feminine gender for the noun. In the case of Butter, we have a noun that is derived from a Latin/Greek neuter (Latin butyrum < Gk. βούτῡρον), which despite its ‘masculine’ ending — in effect a spurious suffix — is feminine in the modern language and historically shows regional variation of gender, with die in the North and der in the South. According to Kluge/Seebold (1995: 148b), the feminine gender is the original and represents a misunderstanding of the Latin plural as a feminine singular, whereas the masculine gender is taken to be a transfer of the gender of the older nouns for the product, viz. Anke and Schmer. If the last two examples showed a German feminine arising from a Latin/Greek neuter, Mauer < OHG mûra is an example of a feminine gender in German based on a Latin masculine, viz. mūrus. Both a Latin/Romance plural form and interference from the gender of the supplanted native word for wall (want fem.) have been advanced in explanation of the change. Fenster attests the neuter gender in all but the earliest sporadic examples in Old High German, though the gender of the loaned word in Latin is feminine, viz. fenestra. The most widely accepted explanation of this is influence from older native words for the more primitive kind of window, which were neuter. Finally, a Latin neuter noun which assumed the masculine gender is der Tempel < OHG tempal (which showed considerable variation between neuter and masculine) < Lat. templum. The most likely explanation of the gender change is morphological analogy with the ending, which is typically masculine. Such a process of gender uncertainty by no means ends with Old High German, it is equally found in Middle High German, where borrowings from Old French, which of course had only two, rather than three, genders, can assume a different gender from that of the loaning language, e.g. OF palais (masc.) > MHG der palas or daz palas; OF banier (masc.) > daz or diu banier. Thus we have established the fact that German, when borrowing from other languages, even

English Loan Words and their Gender in German

77

in the earliest period, was apt to change the gender of the loan words it absorbed, indeed the better assimilated they were into the popular language the more likely they were to undergo gender change as part of the process of assimilation.

2. Types of English Influence Thus far, we have concentrated on loans from Latin, Greek and French, but our principal interest in this paper is loans from English to German. It is well known that the English language has exerted an influence on German by way of loaned vocabulary since the earliest OHG times. Whereas at first, these were mainly loan translations and loan meanings in the context of the creation of a Christian vocabulary, e.g. heilag geist, in later periods, loan words became more prominent, e.g. Klown, Klub. (Ganz 1957: 115 & passim) By this time, in the 17th century, English had already lost the concept of grammatical gender, apart from certain pronominal forms (Chan 2004: 19), so the transference of an English noun into German entailed the assignment of a gender under entirely different circumstances from the loan of a noun from Latin or French into German. English substantival loan words to German can be classed, according to their etymological origin, according to the following categories: 1) Nouns of Germanic origin with a recognizable cognate in German; 2) Nouns of Germanic origin with no recognizable cognate in German; 3) Nouns of French origin, loaned into English, with a recognizable cognate in German; 4) Nouns of French origin, loaned into English, with no recognizable cognate in German; 5) Nouns of Latin/Greek origin, loaned into English, with a recognizable cognate in German; 6) Nouns of Latin/Greek origin, loaned into English, with no recognizable cognate in German; 7) Nouns loaned from other languages into English, e.g. Indian, Chinese; 8) English native formations / others.

78

David Yeandle

In the case of the first six categories, though less so in category 2, a gender will be found, as it were hiding behind the modern English word. If, in what follows, we pay attention to semantic, as well as strictly grammatical, criteria, this is because of the possibility of semantics affecting gender assignment. An example of the first category is Show in German. It is borrowed from English ‘show’ as a polysemous word in the senses: “1a aufwendig inszenierte, auf optische Wirkung bedachte, häufig revueartige Unterhaltungsveranstaltung mit Musik, Tanz, Varietéstücken, Kabarettnummern, Theaterszenen etc. […] 1b meist durch auffällige optische und akustische Spezialeffekte sowie aufwendige Bühnengestaltung, Kleidung etc. gekennzeichnete Art der Darbietung bei musikalischen Veranstaltungen […] 1c im Fernsehen ausgestrahlte — 1a bzw. eigens für das Fernsehen produzierte Unterhaltungsveranstaltung, bei der zahlreiche Künstler mitwirken […] 2 aufsehenerregendes Ereignis, Spektakel [...] Pose […] 3 Veranstaltung, bei der etw. vorgestellt oder vorgeführt wird und/oder wirtschaftliche, künstlerische und andere Erzeugnisse zum Betrachten oder zum Zweck des Verkaufs ausgestellt werden.” (AWB, 1295–1298)

Compared with the 22 meanings, with various subdivisions, in the OED, the German language has clearly borrowed only a few specific senses of ‘show’, related to entertainment. The feminine gender usually accorded to Show corresponds to that of its Germanic cognate Schau in German, 1 though there were instances of the masculine gender in MHG and there are isolated instances of the neuter in the modern language. 2 An example of the second category is provided by the ever-present E-Mail or Mail. This is a word that has taken quite some time to establish a firm, preferred gender. (Yeandle 2007: 5–9) Moreover, it has been the subject of some debate as to which gender is more appropriate, with proponents of the neuter gender and proponents of the feminine making their voices heard, especially in linguistic news groups on Usenet. The masculine gender has not been proposed for the word, but there are serious as well as frivolous arguments in favour of feminine and neuter in the Usenet group

1

OED “f. SHOW v.: cf. MLG., MDu. schowwe fem. (mod.Du. schouw), OHG. scou fem. (MHG. schou, schow(e) fem. and masc., mod.G. schau fem.) looking at, inspection.”

2

Cf. “So zeigen die Kleinsten unter dem Titel ‘Zirkus Fidibus’ ein Show, während weiterer Nachwuchs unter der Devise ‘Bunte Gerätewiese’ sein Können zeigt.“ (Salzburger Nachrichten, 28.11.1992). Quotations are taken from the online COSMAS database of the Institut für deutsche Sprache in Mannheim.

English Loan Words and their Gender in German

79

: e.g. “Email sounds as if it should be neuter”, via the most common “it should be feminine by analogy with die Post” to the facetious “neuter by analogy with I-Mehl ‘flour’” or “because it looks like Email (‘enamel’) which is neuter”. In German more than English, the word is often simplified by the clipping of the initial vowel. The statistics for E-Mail show a genuine split between the more standard feminine, and the more regionally restricted, neuter gender, prevalent especially in Austria. It is probably merely fortuitous that E-Mail has adopted the ancient feminine gender of the Germanic root *malha; however, its history is contorted and fascinating. The OHG word malaha meant a ‘bag or sack for carrying things, a kind of leather satchel’ as used by messengers. It appears to have died out after MHG, where malhe lived on, and not to have been attested in Old English. The OED reasons that mail came from Anglo-Norman male, maele, meole, Old French male (attested 1105), Middle French, French malle, which in turn came from Germanic. If such an etymology is indeed accurate, the German language has borrowed back in E-Mail, via English and Old French, its ancient word for satchel and has succeeded in preserving the etymological gender! Taking an example of category 3, we see how the German word Band /bEnt/ in the sense of “Gruppe von Musikern, die vorzugsweise moderne Musik wie Jazz, Beat, Rock usw. Spielt” (Duden 1989: 206) is borrowed from the English band in the sense of “4. a. A company of musicians; the company of musicians attached to a regiment of the Army”. (OED) It will be noticed that it has undergone a restriction of meaning in German, where it is used as a designation for a pop or rock band and as such has enriched the German language, being an addition to the word field, and not the equivalent of the existing (Musik-)kapelle, a function which the word additionally fulfils in English. The word ‘band’ was loaned into English from French bande in the 15th century, although, ironically, it was originally a Germanic word that had been loaned into Romance, where it had established the new meaning of “collection of people, organized company”. (OED) It was loaned back into German as Bande in this sense, e.g. Räuberbande, and into English as ‘band’, where it developed a musical sense which in turn was loaned into German as an only partially assimilated loan word, owing to the anglicized pronunciation. The important thing to note for our present purpose is that the German loan word has an etymology, traceable back to French, where it attests a

80

David Yeandle

gender, that being feminine. 3 This gender was, it appears, passed on to Bande and so, in terms of the ‘cognate principle’, 4 we could expect Band to take the feminine gender by analogy with the earlier loaned Bande. Can we, however, be sure that that is the reason for the assignment? As an example of our fourth category, I should like to consider the loan of the word Imprint to German, a word considered by the Verein Deutsche Sprache (VDS) to be superfluous and equivalent to Impressum. The sense in which this word is loaned is “the name under which a publisher issues books”; 5 this sense is not yet recorded in the OED, which lists only the related sense “3. a. The name of the publisher, place of publication, and date, printed in a book, usually at the foot of the title-page”, which is equivalent to Impressum. Imprint is usually used in a way implying value judgment, especially prestige, e.g. “bearing the prestigious imprint of Oxford University Press” 6 (Times Online). The etymology of the word is: “ME. type empreynte, –printe, a. F. empreinte ‘a stampe, a violent assault’ (Cotgr.), ppl. n. from empreind-re (pa. pple. empreint); the prefix subseq. conformed to L.: see next. Empreinte was a formation of the same class as armée, assise, conduite, etc.” (OED)

The gender of empreynte in French is feminine; the gender of Imprint in German is neuter. Here we find, then, the first example of a word that has not followed the etymology of its ultimate root. These four examples will suffice to show the main concern of the present investigation, namely whether the ‘etymological principle’ of gender assignment is an important factor in the determination of gender in the present-day German language in loans from English or, alternatively, what other factors might apply. Clearly, only a wide-ranging empirical survey could hope to answer this question fully. There have indeed been a few investigations of gender assignment which have respected the etymological principle. The most comprehensive survey of the principles of gender assignment is that of Chan (2004). 7 Chan’s understanding of the etymological principle, 3

Cf. Trésor de la Langue Française Informatisé , s.v. bande.

4

On this term see Chan 2004: 64–65, and below.

5

Merriam-Webster online, .

6

Brian Vickers, ‘Are all of them by Shakespeare?’, Times .

7

I am most grateful to Dr Chan for her kindly sending me an electronic copy of her dissertation, from which

Online,

09

August

2006,

English Loan Words and their Gender in German

81

which she calls the “Cognate-Prinzip” with reference to the “cognate strategy” of Fuller/Lehnert (2000) and Kuhn (1992) and to Talanga (1987: 83), who had used the term “etymologisches Prinzip”, is different in important aspects from the way the term ‘etymological principle’ is conceived and used in the present investigation: “Das Cognate-Prinzip [...], auch etymologisches Prinzip genannt [...], basiert wie die semantische Analogie auf assoziativer Beziehung: Das entlehnte Substantiv bekommt das Genus nach einem deutschen etymologisch verwandten Substantiv. Das gilt besonders für germanische Sprachen, zumal für das Englische.” (Talanga 1987: 83) “Anstelle eines semantischen Äquivalents dient hier ein etymologisch verwandtes Nomen in der Nehmersprache als Motivationsbasis der Genusbestimmung, wie das Teamwork nach das Werk, der Tea-room nach der Raum und die Boardingschool nach die Schule.” (Chan 2004: 64–65)

Chan points out that, in order for this principle to operate, there must also be a semantic connexion with the cognate word. The difference in my understanding of the principle is that, whereas a cognate German substantive is one possibility, whereby it is to be noted that Chan does not distinguish between native Germanic vocabulary and loaned vocabulary in the donor language — i.e. our categories 1,3, and 5, above — the possibility also exists of a covert or secondary etymological association, as in the case of our categories, 2, 4, and 6, where any connexion that is made in German with the etymological gender of a loan word is done on the basis of a knowledge of that word’s etymology and use beyond, i.e. prior to, the English stage. If we look back to our second example, it would imply, in this case, knowledge of the gender of malhe in MHG by which to assign the feminine to Mail. Clearly, this is a very bold hypothesis and presupposes the influence of linguistic expertise on an objective level. However, words may carry within them on a subjective level a suggestion of gender which is not always easy to quantify.

3. Theories of Gender Assignment for English Loan Words I wish now to turn to the broader aspect of gender assignment for English loan words and the principles upon which it is commonly thought to be

all references and quotations are taken.

82

David Yeandle

based. The subject has a long history, reaching back into the 19th and early 20th century, with pioneering studies by Wilson (1899) and Ganz (1950), followed by important contributions by Carstensen (1980) and Gregor (1983), amongst others. (Chan 2004: 10–15) Whereas Chan uses the “normal” rules for the assignment of gender for native vocabulary and amplifies these with three “Sonderregeln”, including the “Cognate-Prinzip” (2004: 63–68), others have worked with a set of rules specially adapted for English loan words in relation to German. The following list is based on Yang (1990: 153–159), who determined that there are seven major factors that affect the assignment of gender in loans from English to German, viz.: 1) Lexical similarity: the nearest semantic equivalent in German lends its gender to the loaned word, e.g. das Business (Geschäft); die City (Innen-

stadt); das Copyright (Urheberrecht); das Baby (Kleinkind); die Lady (Dame); der Lift (Aufzug, Fahrstuhl); die Lobby (Empfangshalle); der Service (Kundendienst); der Start (Anfang, Beginn). 2) Latent or hidden semantic analogy: the words are back clippings of a longer form, the clipped/missing part providing the gender, e.g. das Au-

Pair (–mädchen); die Holding (–company, –gesellschaft); der Intercity (–zug); das Tennis (–spiel). 3) Group analogy: the specific lexeme takes on the gender of the generic term (archilexeme), e.g. der Brandy (but cf. also der Branntwein), der Cocktail, der Gin, der (Long)drink, der Sherry, der Whisky, by analogy with der Schnaps or der Alkohol. 4) Natural gender: the gender of the person, male or female, is represented in the natural way, e.g. der Boy, der Hotelboy, der Hotelpage, der Page. 5) Number of syllables: the majority of monosyllabic Anglicisms are masculine in German, e.g.: der Bob, Boom, Boy, Boß, Chip, Club, Grill, Lift, Look, Park, Pop, Shop, Star, Start, Stop, Test, Trend; but cf. die Bar, Show and das Deck, Shirt, Team. 6) By morphological analogy: certain suffixes are regularly used with a particular gender:

English Loan Words and their Gender in German

83

a. Nouns ending in are masculine: der Babysitter, der Banker, der

Barkeeper, der Beeper, der Camper, der Computer, der Container, der Manager, der Mixer, der Teenager, but cf. der/das Poster. 8 b. Nouns ending in are masculine. Der Mobster, Gangster. c. Nouns ending in , are masculine: der Bachelor, Processor; der Parachutist, Tourist. d. The English gerund, ending in is taken to be the equivalent of the substantival infinitive in German, and by analogy with this takes the neuter gender: das Airconditioning, Bowling, Camping, Curling, Dancing, Jogging, Marketing, Skating, Training, Upgrading, Upselling. On the other hand there are also nouns of masculine and feminine gender ending in (cf. Sanford, 1998), e.g. der Smoking, die Holding. 9 e. Nouns ending in are neuter, e.g. das Apartment, Appointment, Management. f. Nouns ending in are feminine: e.g. die Fitness, Hostess, but cf. das Business. g. Nouns ending in or are feminine: e.g. die High Fidelity (HiFi), Activity; die Television (TV), Amplification. 7) Compound Anglicisms made up of a verb and particle are masculine or neuter (Yang, 1990: 157): das Check-in, das Make-up, but cf. der (rarely das) Countdown. Chan in her more thorough investigation of the subject has looked, as we saw, at the rules for gender assignment of all nouns, not just loans, in German, and has further identified three special rules for Anglicisms. The matter is thus much more comprehensive and cannot be studied in this con8

Although der Poster in the sense of ‘large paper image for attaching to a wall’ is much less common than das Poster, the masculine is found regularly in this sense in regional contexts (Austria and Switzerland), e.g. “In seinen Schweizer-Armee-Rucksack hat er einen Poster eingepackt” (St. Galler Tagblatt, 30.09.1999); “Noch immer hat der 24jährige zu Hause einen Poster von Kempes an der Wand hängen” (Salzburger Nachrichten, 23.06.1994); “Wenn ich Probleme damit hätte, dürfte ich in meinem Zimmer auch keinen Poster von ihr hängen haben!” (Die Presse, 13.01.1996). Since the popularity of Internet blogs etc. the use throughout the German-speaking world of der Poster in the sense of ‘person who posts a comment to a blog or similar’ has hugely increased: e.g. “Der Poster darf nicht daran gehindert werden, sein eigenes Posting einzusehen oder zu löschen. Ein Moderator kann aber die Verantwortung für ein Posting übernehmen, indem er es vollständig (unter Quellenangabe) quotet und das originale Posting löscht.“ .

9

The gender of Smoking (< Engl. ‘smoking jacket’) is probably derived from Rock/Mantel/Anzug by analogy, that of Holding from Gesellschaft, see above, under 2.

84

David Yeandle

text in detail, but we may note that, whereas no mention is made by Yang of etymological criteria — the nearest he comes to mentioning these being lexical similarity — this is accorded special status by Chan (2004:64 & 277) as one of her Sonderregeln: SON: (1) Das semantische Äquivalent, ÄQU (x). Das Genus vom entlehnten Substantiv richtet sich nach dem entsprechenden semantischen Äquivalent im Deutschen. SON: (2) Das Cognate-Prinzip, COG (x). Das Genus einer Entlehnung richtet sich nach dem etymologisch verwandten Cognate im Deutschen, wenn das Cognate semantisch mit der Entlehnung verbunden ist. SON: (3) Das Defaultgenus, DEF = N. (a) Eine Entlehnung wird dem Neutrum zugeordnet, wenn andere Prinzipien keine klare Genuszuordnung ergeben. (b) Eine Entlehnung wird zuerst dem Neutrum zugeordnet, bis er [sic!] ein etabliertes Genus erhält.

In order to test the hypothesis that etymology plays a role in the assignment of gender, I have undertaken a small empirical investigation of twenty words, based on the list of Anglicisms published by the purist Verein Deutsche Sprache. 10 The list is from the beginning of the letter i, which was chosen because it contains one of the newest and most popular Anglicisms, namely iPod, a name which was invented and first destined for Internet kiosks. 11 There is little doubt that the object owes its success almost as much to its catchy name as to its styling and functionality. In a case such as this, where the object is not actually a ‘pod’, but merely showed a similarity to the ‘door’ of a spacecraft called a ‘pod’ (ibid.), perhaps there should be little expectation that etymological criteria should have any part to play. A pod in this sense is a capsule; “8. A detachable or self-contained compartment on an aircraft, spacecraft, or other vehicle or vessel, esp. one with a particular function. Also: any discrete unit, often having a rounded shape, which forms a separate or detachable part of a larger structure. Freq. with qualifying word.” (OED)

The etymology of ‘capsule’ is unknown and it is not attested early enough in English to show gender. Effectively, this can be termed a native formation in English for which no etymological associations are present. 10 See . Ideally, a much longer list should be tested in a more detailed investigation. 11 See Wikipedia. .

English Loan Words and their Gender in German

85

There are isolated attestations of Space Pod in German, showing the masculine gender, but it was clearly an expression that did not become popular in that language and is unlikely to have influenced iPod. Although there are instances of the neuter gender in German for iPod, it has established itself as an overwhelmingly masculine noun, probably by lexical similarity with MP3Player, Musikplayer, –spieler, etc. but a further criterion is the assignment of the masculine gender to monosyllabic nouns. Perhaps also an association is imagined with Greek πούς, genit. ποδός, e.g. in German der Tetrapod ‘Vierfüßler’ (‘quadruped’), as a kind of spurious or popular etymology.

4. Empirical Analysis We now turn to the list of twenty words in order to test the application of the etymological principle in practice. All except ID are spelled with a lower case initial letter: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

ice icebreaker icebreaker party ice cream ice show ice tea icon identifier ID identity

11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

identity card illumination image image map impact impeachment implementation force imprint inbox incentive

I have deliberately included compound nouns in the list, so that words beginning with a letter other than are also investigated.

Ice is a straightforward noun of Germanic origin with a clearly identifiable cognate in German, das Eis; as a simplex it is hardly used as a loan word in German, and indeed would only be distinguishable in writing or with deliberately anglicized pronunciation, though it is used in the phrases crushed ice and on ice quite frequently. In this case, lexical similarity and the cognate/etymological principle coincide in the assignment of the neuter gender, since the lexically similar word is the same as the etymological cognate. The compound noun icebreaker is glossed “Eisbrecher. Aufwärmgetränk” on the VDS website. This is a relatively rare Anglicism and is used in the sense of

86

David Yeandle

“something that breaks the ice on a project or occasion” (Webster online) including a drink at a party. 12 The usage is somewhat confused by the introduction of a trademark alcopop drink called the ‘ice breaker’: “die 1996 lancierte 20-Prozent Spirituose Ice Breaker (Eckes AG, Nieder-Olm).” (Horizont, 10.07.1997) It is also used in the sense of a speech or introduction to a group where one is unknown, e.g. “Ein Neuling muss zunächst einen ‘Icebreaker’ vortragen. Diese erste Rede dauert fünf Minuten”, (Süddeutsche Zeitung, 18.03.2003) where the gender is shown as masculine. There is a recognizable German cognate in Eisbrecher, a type of ship for breaking a path through ice, as in English ‘ice breaker’. The sense of breaking the ice at a party is also found in the German Eisbrecher, though not in the standard dictionaries (e.g. Duden Universalwörterbuch), e.g. “Mit Christian Pape aus der Karnevalshochburg Köln hatten die Organisatoren einen Eisbrecher par exellence engagiert.” (General-Anzeiger Bonn, 22.01.2007) It is probably a safe assumption that the German word is a loan meaning or possibly loan translation of the English in this sense, whether the nautical use is derived from English is unclear. In this case we have lexical similarity, morphological gender ( for indicating masculine), and etymological equivalence in the sense of our investigation.

Ice breaker party is attested sporadically, e.g. “Wenn die Studenten des Elitenetzwerks Bayern von einer Icebreaker-Party sprechen, geht es keineswegs um ein Tanzfest in der Aula.” (Capital, 05.01.2006) The feminine gender is clear from the example and, of course, dependent on the last element of the compound, viz. Party. 13 Party has existed since 1949, or earlier, in the sense of “häufig zu einem bestimmten Anlaß stattfindendes meist abendliches geselliges Beisammensein mit Musik und Tanz sowie Speisen und Getränken [...]” (AWB, 1036). It was borrowed from Anglo-American ‘party’, which in turn had been imported from French partie (fem.). The first attestation of this sense (“3. a. A social gathering, esp. of invited guests at a person’s house, typically involving eating, drinking, and entertainment.”) is recorded in the OED dating from 1707. There are several possibilities regarding gender assignment. Apart from the etymological principle and analogy with the already loaned Partie (fem.), morphological equivalence between Engl. 12 “Kurz bevor nichts mehr zu wollen ist, hat jemand die rettende Idee und zaubert ein glückspendendes Erfrischungsgetränk auf den Tisch: Icebreaker. Und Alkohol ist auch noch drin. Ein paar Schlucke später, und die Stimmung geht von null auf hundert.” (tageszeitung, 26.09.1997). 13 Cf. Chan Morphological Rule 1 (2004: 204).

English Loan Words and their Gender in German

87

and German (denoting feminine < Lat. –ia) and possible lexical similarity with die Feier might be thought to operate. Ice cream is an Anglicism which is used in the original English form for special effect, to add colour appropriate to the milieu being described, e.g. “Camus — ein Philosoph, der eine Diplomarbeit über ‘Die Beziehungen zwischen Hellenismus und Christentum in den Werken von Plotin und Augustin’ geschrieben hat, der Fußball spielte, gern Ice Cream aß und — Romane und Theaterstücke schrieb.” (Welt am Sonntag, 19.07.1998)

Eiscreme and Eiskrem exist in German, both feminines. The earlier -creme indicates a clear French influence (< French la crème), but the compound could be a loan translation from English and would require further investigation. Here again, the gender of the loan is in accordance with the etymological principle. I do not intend to go through the whole list in this level of detail, but will indicate the main relevant points in the remaining items: Ice show has already been investigated above, under the assignment to categories, the feminine gender and the etymological principle were seen to be valid. Ice tea (masc.) is dependent on the similarity with the existing German der Eistee, even though the ultimate etymology is somewhat complex, going back via Portuguese to Chinese. Once again, the etymological principle is upheld.

Icon is a case which clearly goes against the etymological principle. The gender is, as far as I can ascertain, exclusively neuter in the sense of ‘something symbolic to be imitated’, e.g. “Das ‘Ursi National’-Bikini lebt als nostalgisches Beach-Icon weiter” (Tages-Anzeiger, 27.12.2006) and also in the sense of ‘pictogram on which to click on a computer’, e.g. “Ein Rechtsklick auf das Icon öffnet das Kontextmenü”. (Züricher Tagesanzeiger, 27.03.2000) Clearly, no association is made with the gender of the existing German die Ikone (< Lat./Gk. fem.) and perhaps no semantic association was perceived. An identification of lexical similarity with das Bild or Vorbild in the first sense and Bild, Zeichen, Piktogramm in the second probably explains the neuter.

Identifier, which is used in a number of different technical senses, is a native formation in English from the verb identify plus (cf. OED,

88

David Yeandle

s.v.), but there is a parallel formation in French, showing the masculine gender, viz. identifieur, and the German masculine Identifikator, despite the difference in morphology, might also be taken as evidence of the etymological principle in the gender assignment of der Identifier, albeit the masculine gender is more probably dependent directly on the ending. In the case of ID, we have an initialism which stands for identity or identity card: “Weiter ist ein Passfoto neuesten Datums (auch für Kleinkinder ab Geburt) und die alte ID mitzubringen”. (St. Galler Tagblatt, 19.05.1999) These three items in our list all have the feminine gender by analogy with the corresponding German word die Identität or die Karte, whereby it has to be noted that the ending is always feminine (< Lat. –tatem).

Illumination (fem.) is identical in spelling with the German word Illumination, and the English origins can only be deduced in the written language from the context. As with the previous example, the morphological ending is always feminine (< Lat. –tionem). In all four cases, the etymological principle applies.

Image is neuter in German; it is similar to Icon, inasmuch as there is a clear etymological point of comparison with die Imago (< Lat. Imago, fem.), a word restricted to the Bildungssprache. However, it does not assume the feminine gender that should follow according to the etymological principle (Engl. image < F image, fem.). Either a semantic association with Bild or a case of default gender may be assumed. Image map presents an interesting case of alignment with the etymological principle, though I could find only one attestation in LexisNexis () which exhibited the gender: “Besonders hilfreich ist die Möglichkeit über die sogenannte ‘Image Map’ für jedes der Gene, die auf den Atlas-Arrays enthalten sind, die Daten aus der ‘GenBank Database’ abrufen zu können.” (Labo — Magazin für Labortechnik, 01.07.1998)

Engl. map is most likely derived from late Latin mappa, 14 as is German Mappe, a word designating a cloth or carrying case for drawings, etc., as well 14 Cf. OED, s.v., “Either < post-classical Latin mappa map (from c1120 in British sources; in classical Latin ‘towel, napkin’, a word of Punic origin according to Quintilian), or shortened < MAPPEMONDE n. or MAPPA MUNDI n. Cf. Old French mape, mappe map of the world (c1160 or later, rare; not recorded in AngloNorman).”

English Loan Words and their Gender in German

89

as in earlier times a map (DWB). The etymological principle might be thought to apply here, though this may be merely fortuitous. There is further the possibility of lexical similarity here, the feminine gender of Image map possibly being suggested by die Karte.

Impact is an Anglicism already listed in the Duden Universalwörterbuch with two meanings, one from advertising language, one from golf. It is now used also in a general sense as in English, e.g. “Der Impact von Cultural Studies auf die Forschung zu Moderne und Modernität”. (Die Presse, 27.04.1998) It was loaned into English from late Latin impactus; French borrowed the word in the 19th century from Latin. The masculine gender in German corresponds to the etymological principle but may be due to lexical similarity with der Stoß.

Impeachment (neut.) is a word that has found its way into the Duden Universalwörterbuch, specifically in the US context of accusing a president or high official of state of an act making him/her unworthy of office, although it has a long history in this sense also in British English. The etymology from OF/Latin implies a neuter gender, 15 but this is suggested morphologically as well by . The etymological principle could again be seen to operate. The term Implementation Force is a technical one of NATO peacekeeping activities, e.g. “die Implementation Force (Ifor) in Bosnien-Herzegowina zur Überwachung des Dayton-Abkommens”, 16 and as such it is immediately recognizable in its specificity. Force (fem.) is attested in various collocations in the Duden Universalwörterbuch, e.g. Force majeure, so the assumption of the etymological principle in this case would again be valid, although a case might be made for lexical similarity with Kraft or Truppe. We have investigated imprint above in our exemplification of the categories. It was seen not to follow the etymological principle.

Inbox is seldom used, according to LexisNexis (only three attestations), as the equivalent of Eingangskorb in the context of e-mail. Its feminine gender is dependent on the latter part of the word, namely –box. The etymology of ‘box’ and of German Buchse/Büchse is thought to be the same, although 15 Cf. OED “OF. empechement, empeschement, mod.F. empêchement (whence med.L. impechementum, impechiamentum), f. empêche-r to IMPEACH: see -MENT.” 16 Cited from: .

90

David Yeandle

there are complexities, and the gender in OE was masculine or neuter (cf. also Lat. pyx fem). 17 In a sense, the etymological principle may be seen to be working here, though by analogy with the gender of German Büchse rather than English. Other suggestions that have been made are semantic analogy with die Kiste. Finally, incentive is a straightforward case of neuter by analogy with das Inzentiv < Latin incentivum (neut.), although der Incentive is also found as a clipping of der Incentive Plan. The etymological principle is seen to operate in the main here. From this investigation of twenty words, we have seen the validity ‘at least as a possible explanation of the gender’ of the etymological principle in seventeen cases out of twenty (85%). Only three are definitely not in accordance with the etymological principle. 21.

Conclusions

Our study has shown that the etymological principle potentially plays a large part in gender assignment, although serious studies of this criterion have ignored it or relegated it to a place of subsidiary importance. As we saw, Yang had no place for this in his list of criteria, and whereas Chan (2004: 96) is prepared to acknowledge the ‘Cognate-Prinzip’, which, as we have seen, is not identical to the etymological principle, as an important, but not easily quantifiable determiner of gender, she comments that in practice few loans’ gender can be ascribed to this: “Außer expliziten Ableitungen, deren Genus bereits von der Suffixregel festzulegen ist, hat das COG im analysierten Korpus ein relativ kleines Skopus. Unter den einsilbigen Simplizia lässt sich die Genuszuweisung von lediglich ca. zehn Einträgen eindeutig auf das COG zurückführen (u.a. Cream zu Creme, Lodge zu Loge, Ounce zu Unze, Scene zu Szene, Ace zu Ass, Date zu Datum, Pound zu Pfund, Floor zu Flur), unter den mehrsilbigen nur vier (Center zu Zentrum, Waggon zu Wagen, College zu Kollegium, Acre zu Akker), unter den Komposita etwas mehr (alle Bildungen –group zu Gruppe, – card zu Karte usw.). Es liegt zwischen dem deutschen Cognate und der Ent17 Cf. “OE. box neut. or masc.: it is not clear whether this was (1) another sense of box, the name of the tree, (2) an independent adoption of L. buxum boxwood, in the sense of a thing made of box, or (3) an altered form of L. pyx-is (puxis, med.L. buxis) box: see PYX. In favour of the latter cf. OHG. buhsa fem. (MHG. buhse, bühse, Ger. büchse, MDu. busse, bosse, Du. bus, bos) [...]”

English Loan Words and their Gender in German

91

lehnung häufig ein Bedeutungsunterschied oder eine stilistische Differenzierung vor: vgl. die Action für spannende Handlung, turbulente Szenen vs. die Aktion für Unternehmung, Handeln.”

This assessment is based on the assumption that a cognate, almost identical to the loaned term, must exist in German. Whereas, as we have seen, our understanding of the etymological principle is conceived more widely and encompasses not only latent etymology but also derivational suffixes such as and . It presupposes an awareness of the etymology and gender which lie behind the English word in (usually) Greek, Latin, or French. Looking at Chan’s examples above, one could as well argue in terms of the etymological principle that Lodge should be feminine because it comes from OF loge (fem.) and is the equivalent of Modern French la loge, without needing to make reference to the German word Loge; similarly one could explain die Scene by analogy with Fr. la scène or die Action by analogy with l’action (fem.). In this way, one sees a substantially more frequent connexion between etymology and gender than is evident from the more narrowly conceived ‘Cognate-Prinzip’. If our statistics are reliable, they show that the etymological principle is in an overwhelming majority of cases an explanation of a loan’s gender, though not always the only or even the most obvious explanation. My premise is that the German language will attempt to assign a gender to an English loan that is in accordance with the natural etymology of that word, where the gender is visible either via a cognate German word (usually an earlier loan from Latin or French) or via the etymological cognate in Greek, Latin or French, which languages are the antecedents of the majority of English loans to German. In many cases, it will be the morphology which is representative of the foreign noun endings which determined gender in those languages. A survey of loans to German from Germanic roots, such as Mail, for which we saw only one example, would probably yield different results, as there would be less obvious indication of gender. Moreover, a survey where substantial numbers of native English formations were included, such as pod/iPod, where the etymology is uncertain or at best spurious, would further diminish the proportion of the etymological principle. Nevertheless, I hope to have shown from this brief survey that the etymological principle is potentially an important factor in gender assignment which cannot be ignored and deserves to be investigated in extensive detail on the basis of a full empirical, corpus-based study.

92

David Yeandle

References AWB = Anglizismen-Wörterbuch (2001). Der Einfluß des Englischen auf den deutschen Wortschatz nach 1945. Begründet von Broder Carstensen, fortgeführt von Ulrich Busse, unter Mitarbeit von Regina Schmude. 3 vols. Berlin / New York. De Gruyter. Carstensen, Broder (1980): Das Genus englischer Fremd- und Lehnwörter im Deutschen. In: Viereck, Wolfgang (ed.): Studien zum Einfluß der englischen Sprache auf das Deutsche. (Tübinger Beiträge zur Linguistik 132). Tübingen. Narr, 37–75. Chan, Sze-Mun (2004): Genusintegration. Eine systematische Untersuchung zur Genuszuweisung englischer Entlehnungen in der deutschen Sprache. Diss. Heidelberg. Chan, Sze-Mun (2005): Genusintegration. Eine systematische Untersuchung zur Genuszuweisung englischer Entlehnungen in der deutschen Sprache. Schriftenreihe des Instituts für Deutsch als Fremdsprachenphilologie). München. iudicium. Duden, Deutsches Universalwörterbuch (1989): Hrsg. von der Dudenredaktion. 2., überarbeitete Auflage. Mannheim, etc. Dudenverlag. DWB = Grimm, J. / Grimm, W. / Hildenbrandt, V. / Wagner, T. / Bartz, H.-W. / Universität Trier. Kompetenzzentrum für elektronische Erschließungs- und Publikationsverfahren in den Geisteswissenschaften. (2004). Der digitale Grimm deutsches Wörterbuch (Elektronische Ausgabe der Erstarbeitung). Frankfurt am Main. Zweitausendeins. Fuller, Janet M. and Lehnert, Heike (2000): Noun Phrase Structure in GermanEnglish Codeswitching: Variation in Gender Assignment and Article Use. In: International Journal of Bilingualism 4/2000, 399–420. Ganz, Peter F. (1950): The Gender of English Loanwords in German. An Historical Study. M.A. thesis, typewritten. London. Gregor, Bernd (1983): Genuszuordnung: Das Genus englischer Lehnwörter im Deutschen. Tübingen. Niemeyer. Kluge, F., and Seebold, E. (1995): Etymologisches Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache. 23rd revised edition. Berlin / New York. De Gruyter Kuhn, Hans (1992): English Loanwords and the Tyranny of Gender. In: Blank, Claudia (ed.): Language and civilization: a concerted profusion of essays and studies in honour of Otto Hietsch. Frankfurt/M. Lang, 612–623. Merriam-Webster online. . OED = Oxford English Dictionary online edition. .

English Loan Words and their Gender in German

93

Sanford, Gerlinde Ulm (1998): Amerikanismen in der deutschen Sprache der Gegenwart. In: Trans — Internet-Zeitschrift für Kulturwissenschaften 3. . Talanga, Tomislav (1987): Das Phänomen der Genusschwankung in der deutschen Gegenwartssprache — untersucht nach Angaben neuerer Wörterbücher der deutschen Standardsprache. Diss. Bonn. Trésor de la Langue Française Informatisé. . Wilson, Charles Bundy (1899): The Grammatical Gender of English Words in German. In: Americana Germanica 3, 265–283. Yeandle, David N. (2007): Are German Nouns Oversexed? Gender Assignment in Foreign Imports to German: A Diachronic and Synchronic Perspective. Inaugural Lecture. 1 February 2005. Department of German, School of Humanities, King’s College London.

Yang, Wenliang (1990): Anglizismen im Deutschen: am Beispiel des Nachrichtenmagazines Der Spiegel. Tübingen: Niemeyer.

Appendix Table of English Loans Showing Evidence of the Etymological Principle for Gender Assignment A. B. C. D. E. F. G. H. I. J. K. L. M.

KEY Lemma Etymological principle applies? Etymologically relevant word Alternative explanation of German gender Gender Nouns of Germanic origin with recognizable cognate in German Nouns of Germanic origin with no recognizable cognate in German Nouns of French origin, loaned into English, with recognizable cognate in German Nouns of French origin, loaned into English, with no recognizable cognate in German Nouns of Latin/ Greek origin, loaned into English, with recognizable cognate in German Nouns of Latin/ Greek origin, loaned into English, with no recognizable cognate in German Nouns loaned from other languages into English, e.g. Indian/ Chinese English native formations

94

David Yeandle

A ice (e.g. in crushed ice)

B

C

D lexical similarity (das Eis)

E

F

yes

das Eis

icebreaker

yes

der Eisbrecher

icebreaker party

yes

ice cream

yes

die Partie die Eiscreme/ Eiskrem

morphological (-er) lexical similarity (die Feier)? lexical similarity (die Sahne)?

n

1

m

1

f

1

f

1

ice show

yes

die Schau

ice tea

yes

der Eistee

Group analogy: drinks are usu. masc.

m

lexical similarity (1. das Bild, Vorbild 2. Bild, Abbild, Zeichen, Piktogramm)

n

no

identifier

yes

die Ikone F. identifieur (m.), cf. der Identifikator

ID

yes

die Identität

identity

yes

die Identität

identity card

yes

die Karte

Illumination

yes

die Illumination

H

f

lexical similarity (die Vorstellung/Aufführung)?

icon

G

I

J

K

L

M

1 1

1

morphological (-er) morphological (ty/-tät) morphological (ty/-tät)

m

1

f

1

f

1

morphological (-ə) f. morphological (-tion) f.

f

1

f

1

n

1

lexical similarity (das Bild/ Abbild/ Bildnis)? lexical similarity (die Karte)? lexical similarity (der Stoß)? Cf. also der Pakt.

Image

no

die Imago

image map

yes

die Mappe

Impact

yes

Impeachment

yes

Implementation force

yes

Lat. impactus OF empechement (m.), MLat. impechementum (n.) die Force majeure, F. la force

Imprint

no

F. empreinte (f.)

lexical similarity (das Impressum)?

n

Inbox

yes

Die Büchse/ Buchse

lexical similarity (die Kiste)?

f

Incentive

yes

das Inzentiv

lexical similarity (das Inzentiv)

n

morphological (-ment) n.

f

1

m

1

n

1

lexical similarity (die Kraft/ Truppe)?

1 1 1

4

0

6

2

1 3

2

1

2

In: Falco Pfalzgraf (Hg.) (2008): Englischer Sprachkontakt in den Varietäten des Deutschen / English in Contact with Varieties of German. Wien, Frankfurt a. M. u.a. Peter Lang Verlag. S. 95– 122.

Eva WITTENBERG & Kerstin PAUL (Universität Potsdam/Germany, Institut für Germanistik)

[email protected], [email protected]

„Aşkım, Baby, Schatz …“ Anglizismen in einer multiethnischen Jugendsprache Abstract With this paper, we would like to stimulate the discussion of Anglicisms found in multiethnolectal youth varieties that have been emerging in many urban areas in Europe. We base our analysis on oral and written data from Kiezdeutsch, a German substandard variety that serves as a youth language as well as a contact language. We hypothesize that the role of Anglicisms in this register is somewhat weakened compared to other youth languages, in that Kiezdeutsch speakers have a wider range of sources to draw their most expressive notions from. Interestingly, our data shows that this hypothesis proves true only for computer-mediated communication. In oral communication there are fewer foreign influences overall, among which Anglicisms are, however, predominant.

1. Einleitung Während Anglizismen in deutscher Jugend- und Standardsprache bereits gut untersucht sind, 1 stellt der Einfluss des Englischen auf multiethnolektale Varietäten des Deutschen noch ein unbestelltes Feld dar. Mit diesem Beitrag möchten wir einen Anstoß für künftige Forschungsarbeit in diesem Gebiet geben und zugleich einige erste Schritte unternehmen. 2 Unsere folgende Analyse basiert auf Daten aus ‚Kiezdeutsch‘, einem jugendsprachlichen Multiethnolekt, der vor allem in urbanen Gegenden Deutschlands gesprochen wird. Unsere Hypothese ist: Da diese Varietät a) eine Jugendsprache und b) in einem stark multilingualen Kontext entstanden ist, sollten diejenigen Funktionen, die in anderen Jugendsprachen von Angli-

1

Siehe v.a. Fink (1975) zu Anglizismen in der Werbesprache, Eisenberg (2001) zur grammatischen Integration von Anglizismen, Androutsopoulos (1998) zu Anglizismen in der Jugendsprache.

2

Wir danken Horst Simon, Heike Wiese, Ulrike Freywald und Bastiaan Oud für hilfreiche Kommentare und Ergänzungen. Die Arbeit an diesem Artikel wurde unterstützt von der Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), Sonderforschungsbereich (SFB) “Informationsstruktur” (Projekt “Kiezdeutsch”, PI: Heike Wiese), der Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes (Kerstin Paul) und dem Evangelischen Studienwerk Villigst (Eva Wittenberg).

96

Eva Wittenberg & Kerstin Paul

zismen übernommen werden, im Kiezdeutschen zumindest teilweise durch arabisch-türkische Elemente ersetzt werden. Sollte sich diese Hypothese bewahrheiten, wäre dies ein erster Hinweis auf eine sich graduell wandelnde Rolle des Englischen in einem signifikanten Teil der jugendlichen Gegenwartssprache, wird doch Kiezdeutsch nicht nur von jugendlichen Migranten, sondern auch vielen monolingualen Deutschen gesprochen. 3 Im Folgenden werden wir zunächst einen kurzen Überblick über das Forschungsgebiet ‚Kiezdeutsch‘ geben, um danach Ergebnisse einer ersten Korpusstudie an Hand von gesprochenem Kiezdeutsch und Chat-Daten vorzustellen.

2. Kiezdeutsch: Eine multiethnische Jugendsprache im urbanen Deutschland Kiezdeutsch ist eine multiethnische Jugendsprache, die vor allem in urbanen Vierteln deutscher Städte auftritt, zum Beispiel in Mannheim (vgl. Kallmeyer & Keim 2003), Freiburg (vgl. Auer 2003), Hamburg (vgl. Dirim & Auer 2004) und Berlin (u.a. Eksner 2001, Kern & Selting 2006). Die Bezeichnungen dafür variieren allerdings von ‚Gemischtsprechen‘ (Hinnenkamp 2003) über ‚Ghettodeutsch‘ (Keim 2004), ‚Türkendeutsch‘ (Kern & Selting 2006) zu ‚Kanak Sprak‘ (Zaimoğlu 1995). Wir bezeichnen diese Varietät mit dem Begriff ‚Kiezdeutsch‘, da dieser von den Sprechern selbst verwendet wird (vgl. Wiese 2006a) und nicht negativ konnotiert ist. Wir definieren Kiezdeutsch sowohl als ‚Multiethnolekt‘ (im Sinne von Quist 2000; 2008; vgl. auch Clyne 2000) als auch als ‚Jugendsprache‘ (im Sinne von Androutsopoulos 1998). Kiezdeutsch wird hier als ‚Varietät‘ gesehen. Damit betonen wir die Eigenständigkeit und grammatische Produktivität dessen, was Neuland (2003) als „subkulturellen Stil“ bezeichnet. Kiezdeutsch weist grammatische Merkmale auf, die es von anderen jugendsprachlichen und Lernervarietäten unterscheiden (vgl. Freywald et al., im Druck). Äquivalente zu Kiezdeutsch wurden in verschiedenen Ländern Europas beschrieben, u.a. Rinkebysvenska in Schweden (Kotsinas 1992, Fraurud 2003, Bijvoet 2003), der Copenhagen Multiethnolect in Dänemark (Quist 3

Vgl. Zu Kiezdeutsch sprechenden monolingualen Deutschen, siehe Freywald et al. (im Druck) und Wiese (2006).

Anglizismen in einer multiethnischen Jugendsprache

97

2005) oder Straattaal in den Niederlanden (Nortier 2001, Appel 1999). Charakteristisch sind — neben dem Vorkommen in Großstädten — für alle genannten Varietäten ein Migrationshintergrund der Sprecher, der Status als Jugendsprache und bestimmte grammatische Spezifika. Im Folgenden geben wir einen knappen Überblick über diese Merkmale. 2.1 Jugendsprachliche Aspekte In der Forschung werden im Allgemeinen Jugendsprachen als „sprachlich-kommunikative Muster verstanden, die in der Jugendphase habituell verwendet und in der Regel auch von der Gemeinschaft als solche erkannt werden“ (Androutsopoulos 2005: 174). Kiezdeutsch zeichnet sich dadurch aus, dass es vor allem in Peer-Group-Situationen unter Jugendlichen verwendet wird und damit einen „We-Code“ konstruiert (Hinnenkamp 2005: 91). Dadurch werden die kommunikativen Ziele entsprechend geformt: Die Sprecher wählen sprachliche Marker, um sich einer entsprechenden Gruppe zuzuordnen und sich gleichzeitig von anderen Gruppen abzugrenzen. Wie Pujolar (2001: 7) sagt: „[…] the use of particular speech varieties in the context of youth culture is an important part of the processes whereby young people construct their views about the world and their relationships amongst themselves and with other social groups.“

Kiezdeutsch als Jugendsprache fungiert also als identitätsstiftendes Register. Kiezdeutsch zeigt typische Merkmale von Jugendsprache: So finden sich Innovationen auf lexikalischer Ebene, charakterisiert von einer bildhaften Metaphorik und markierten Substandardausdrücken. Albrecht (1993: 33, unsere Übersetzung) charakterisiert diese sprachliche Strategie als ein Bemühen, sich „um jeden Preis von den anderen zu unterscheiden.“ Allerdings wäre es zu kurz gegriffen, Kiezdeutsch allein als Jugendsprache zu definieren. Wie Androutsopoulos (1998) diskutiert, spielen die sozialen und kulturellen Hintergründe der Sprecher in der Analyse jugendkultureller und jugendsprachlicher Phänomene eine nicht zu unterschätzende Rolle. Für Kiezdeutsch gilt dies ganz besonders, wie im folgenden Abschnitt gezeigt werden wird.

98

Eva Wittenberg & Kerstin Paul

2.2 Multiethnolektale Aspekte Kiezdeutsch-Sprecher leben typischerweise in multiethnischen Wohnvierteln. Die meisten gehören der zweiten oder dritten Einwanderergeneration an und sprechen mit ihren Eltern oft deren Muttersprache — z.B. Kurdisch, Türkisch, Arabisch oder Persisch. In Peer-Group-Situationen oder in der Schule sind allerdings auch Kompetenzen im Beherrschen der deutschen Standardsprache notwendig. In Vierteln wie Berlin-Kreuzberg, in denen Jugendliche mit ganz unterschiedlichen sprachlichen Hintergründen aufeinander treffen, werden daher aus den verfügbaren Ressourcen eigene sprachliche Strukturen und Stile geschaffen — teils mit den Funktionen einer lingua franca (vgl. Wiese 2006a: 248), teils mit denen eines Gruppenstils (vgl. Keim 1997 zu Merkmalen eines sozialen Stils). Kiezdeutsch und europäische Entsprechungen zeichnen sich also vor allem dadurch aus, dass sie in multiethnischen Kontexten verwendet werden (Quist 2005 für Dänemark, Kotsinas 1992 für Schweden, Nortier 2001 für die Niederlande). Kiezdeutsch dient hier allerdings nicht ausschließlich zur Verständigung zwischen Menschen mit unterschiedlichen Muttersprachen, sondern auch dazu, einen Standpunkt zur Mehrheitsgesellschaft bzw. eine Gruppenidentität auszudrücken (vgl. Hinnenkamp 2005, Auer 2003, Dirim & Auer2004) für ausführlichere Diskussionen). Wichtig ist der Unterschied zum so genannten ‚Gastarbeiterdeutsch‘. Im Unterschied zu Sprechern von Lernervarietäten sind Kiezdeutsch-Sprecher im Allgemeinen in der Lage, eine Standardvarietät zu verwenden, wenn es die Situation erfordert. Außerdem sprechen nicht nur Jugendliche mit Migrationshintergrund Kiezdeutsch, sondern auch deutsche Muttersprachler ohne Migrationshintergrund (vgl. Wiese 2006a: 251). Alles in allem finden sich in Kiezdeutsch also Merkmale von Jugendsprachen und Kontaktsprachen. 2.3 Grammatische Besonderheiten Während im vorhergehenden Abschnitt vor allem auf die soziale Dimension von Kiezdeutsch eingegangen wurde, möchten wir im Folgenden wichtige Aspekte kiezdeutscher Grammatik vorstellen, um einen Eindruck der formalen Charakteristika dieser Varietät zu vermitteln.

Anglizismen in einer multiethnischen Jugendsprache

99

Kiezdeutsch weist ein relativ stabiles System grammatischer Besonderheiten auf, das vor allem auf zwei Mechanismen zurückgreift: Grammatische ‚Reduktion‘ und systematische ‚Ausweitung‘ bestehender Strukturen. Beide Mechanismen sind typisch für Kontaktsprachen (Silva-Corvalán 1990: 163). Ferner spielt ‚Informationsstruktur‘ eine wichtige Rolle. Drei Beispiele sollen im Folgenden exemplarisch für die Systematizität kiezdeutscher Grammatikentwicklung stehen. I. ‚Reduktion‘: Bloße Nominalphrasen (NPs) als Lokalangaben In Kiezdeutsch werden häufig bloße NPs als Direkational- und Lokalangaben verwendet, wie Beispiel 1 zeigt: 1)

Morgen ich geh Arbeitsamt.

Dieses Muster wird im Standarddeutschen nur in Konstruktionen als akzeptabel gesehen, in denen die Lokalangabe eine Nahverkehrs-Haltestelle ist. Wie Beispiel 2b zeigt, kann die Lokalangabe im Standarddeutschen allerdings nicht direktional verwendet werden. Insofern ist die direktionale Angabe „Arbeitsamt“ in Beispiel 1 eine Ausweitung der im Standarddeutschen bestehenden Muster. 2)

a. Ich steige Alexanderplatz um. b. *Der Zug fährt Wannsee.

Es ist ersichtlich, dass bloße Nominalphrasen im Kiezdeutschen zwar ein Beispiel grammatischer Reduktion sind, ihre Wurzeln allerdings in existierenden standarddeutschen Konstruktionen haben (vgl. Paul et al., in Druck). II. ‚Ausweitung‘: Neue Funktionsverbgefüge Noch deutlicher wird dies im Fall von Konstruktionen, wie sie in Beispiel 3 zu sehen sind: 3)

a. Ich mach dich Messer. b. Machst du rote Ampel. c. Hast du U-Bahn? — Nee, ich hab Fahrrad.

Wie Wiese (2006a) erläutert, wird hier das Muster standarddeutscher Funktionsverbgefüge übernommen: ein „semantisch gebleichtes“, aus einer hochfrequenten und stark unterspezifizierten Klasse stammendes Verb über-

100

Eva Wittenberg & Kerstin Paul

führt ein morphosyntaktisch reduziertes Nomen in einen Prädikatsausdruck. Dieses Nomen liefert dann die Bedeutung der ganzen Konstruktion (vgl. Wittenberg, in Vorbereitung). Während im Standarddeutschen dieses Muster mit wenigen Ausnahmen nicht mehr produktiv ist, wird es im Kiezdeutschen regelmäßig angewendet und ist somit ein typisches Beispiel für die Ausweitung und Übergeneralisierung bestehender grammatischer Strukturen. III. ‚Informationsstruktur‘: „so“ als Fokusmarker Wie Paul et al. (eingereicht) zeigen, übernimmt im Kiezdeutschen der Partikel „so“ eine pragmatische Funktion: „so“ markiert den Fokus einer Äußerung, ohne selbst semantischen Gehalt zu tragen: 4)

wir sind imma bei haus der jugend da ... da gibs so club imma bei [h.] wir sin imma da … für jugendliche so zum beispiel da gibs so billiard-raum

Pragmatische Stützung ist ein typisches Merkmal von Kontaktsprachen, genauso wie der Einfluss fremder Sprachen auf das jeweilige Lexikon. Im Folgenden möchten wir zeigen, ob und wie die Jugend- und Kontaktsprache Kiezdeutsch vom Englischen beeinflusst ist.

3. Forschung zu jugendsprachlichen Anglizismen Der Bereich der Entlehnung von Anglizismen in das Deutsche ist für unterschiedliche Register untersucht worden, z.B. für die Werbesprache von Schütte (1996), für Pressesprache von Fink (1997), oder für die Kommunikation im Internet von Schlobinski (2000). Das Vorkommen von Anglizismen in jugendsprachlichen Varietäten wurde in der Forschung bereits ausgiebig beleuchtet (z.B. Androutsopoulos 1998, Zifonun 2000, Schubert & Watzlawick 2004). Dürscheid und Spitzmüller (2006: 27) bemerken, dass „Bereiche, in denen Anglizismen vergleichsweise häufig vorkommen, im Leben vieler Jugendlicher eine wichtige Rolle spielen“. Sie nennen dabei u.a. „Musik“, „Sport“, „Technik“ und „neue Medien“ (ebd.). Der Tenor der öffentlichen Meinung allerdings ist häufig, dass der als übermäßig wahrgenommene Gebrauch von Anglizismen unter Jugendlichen ein weiteres Beispiel für den Verfall der deutschen Sprache dar-

Anglizismen in einer multiethnischen Jugendsprache

101

stelle. Dies ist beispielsweise die Haltung des Vereins Deutsche Sprache (VDS), der mit Studien zu ‚Denglisch‘ eine sehr sprachpuristische Haltung einnimmt (vgl. u.a. Hildebrandt 2003, Doehlemann 2003) und den Tod der deutschen Sprache fürchtet. Androutsopoulos (2005) stellt im Gegensatz dazu dar, dass die Verwendung von Anglizismen zwar über Jugendsprachen und Massenmedien Eingang in die Standardsprache finden können, dass es sich dabei aber über einen langfristigen und mehrdimensionalen Prozess handelt, der die Standardsprache nicht bedroht. Für unsere Analyse ist jedoch vor allem von Interesse, welche Motivation Sprecher für den Gebrauch von Anglizismen haben. Eine Analyse zum Stellenwert englischen Sprachmaterials bei Jugendlichen legt Androutsopoulos (2004) am Beispiel von Hip-Hop-Foren vor. Dabei stellt er dar, wie vernacular English, meistens in Form von Routinen und einiger weniger charakteristischer Kennzeichen aus dem US-amerikanischen Hip-Hop auf graphematischer Ebene von den Sprechern zur Herstellung einer bestimmten Identität genutzt wird. Hier ergeben sich Anknüpfungspunkte zum Thema dieses Aufsatzes, denn US-amerikanische Musikvorbilder und –Stile (Hip-Hop, Rap) sind auch für unsere Sprechergruppe von Bedeutung. Zu überprüfen ist also, inwieweit englisches Sprachmaterial aus der Hip-Hop- und Rap-Szene in unseren Daten vorhanden ist. Die bedeutungsvolle Mischung der einer Person zur Verfügung stehenden Register wird bei Hinrichs (2006) am Beispiel von persönlichen E-Mails jamaikanischer Studenten dargestellt. Die Studenten verwenden in privaten E-Mails Standardenglisch neben jamaikanischem Kreol. Hinrichs illustriert, dass das Code-Switching zwischen Englisch und Kreol, einem rein mündlichen Register, für das kein orthografischer Standard existiert, eine bedeutungsvolle rhetorische Strategie der Kommunikation im Internet darstellt: „double-voicing“ als „dynamic identity management“ (Hinrichs 2006: 196). Neben solchem Code-Switching sind auch graphostilistische Normabweichungen oder Alternation von eigenen und fremden graphischen Codes („graphisches Crossing“) wichtige Strategien für die Konstitution eines gruppenspezifischen sozialen Stils, wie Spitzmüller (2007: 400, 413) zeigt. Dabei reicht beispielsweise schon die Verwendung eines Graphems in einer für das Deutsche markierten Funktion, z.B. die Endung als Pluralmarker, um sich einer bestimmten Gruppe zuzuordnen, mit welcher dieser Zeichen-

102

Eva Wittenberg & Kerstin Paul

gebrauch assoziiert wird — im Fall des mit Black English und HipHop-Kultur (vgl. auch Androutsopoulos 2004). Die Erkenntnisse von Androutsopoulos (2004) in Bezug auf die Verwendung von vernacular English in deutschen Hip-Hop-Foren kann wegen ähnlicher Kommunikationsbedingungen auch auf Posts und Gästebucheinträge auf so genannten social network sites (SNS) übertragen werden. Graphisches Crossing im Sinne von Spitzmüller (2007) und Codeswitching stellen hier Strategien der Selbstdarstellung und des Ausdrucks eines bestimmten sozialen Stils dar. Insbesondere der häufig stark rituelle und formelhafte Charakter solcher Gästebucheinträge, 4 bei dem die propositionale Funktion der Informationsübermittlung weitgehend zurücktritt, lässt den Aspekt der Identitätskonstituierung noch stärker hervortreten. Anglizismen in Jugendsprache dienen also zur Identitätskonstruktion durch ‚double-voicing‘, aber auch zur Steigerung der Expressivität. Wenn diese Aufgaben in multiethnischen Jugendsprachen, die aber durch Massenmedien und Popkultur auch andere Varietäten beeinflussen können, 5 von arabisch-türkischen Elementen übernommen werden, öffnen sich interessante Perspektiven für die Jugendspracheforschung, die sich bisher fast ausschließlich auf englische Einflüsse auf den Sprachgebrauch von Teenagern konzentriert hat.

4. Korpora und Untersuchungsschwerpunkte Dieser Auswertung liegen zwei unterschiedliche Korpora zugrunde. Das erste Korpus besteht aus Selbstaufnahmen von Kiezdeutsch sprechenden Jugendlichen aus Berlin-Kreuzberg. 6 Für diese Analyse wurden 26 Aufnahmen ausgewertet. Diese Aufnahmen bestehen jeweils aus zwei- bis ca. dreißigminütigen Interaktionen, die in kleinen Gruppen (drei bis sechs Jugendliche) stattfanden.

4

Zur expressiven und symbolischen Bedeutung ritueller Kommunikation vgl. Werlen (1984), Antos (1987), Paul (1990) und Fix (1998).

5

Zum Einfluss kiezdeutscher Varietäten vgl. Androutsopoulos (2001), Keim / Androutsopoulos (2000), Kotthoff (2004).

6

Dieses Korpus befindet sich noch im Aufbau. Die Daten wurden im Sommer 2008 im Rahmen des Teilprojekts B6 „Grammatische Reduktion und informationsstrukturelle Präferenzen in einer kontaktsprachlichen Varietät des Deutschen: Kiezdeutsch“ des Sonderforschungsbereichs 632 „Informationsstruktur“ erhoben. Wir bedanken uns bei Heike Wiese für die Erlaubnis zur Nutzung der Daten, sowie bei Ulrike Freywald für die Bereitstellung der Transkripte.

Anglizismen in einer multiethnischen Jugendsprache

103

Das zweite Korpus setzt sich aus Profilseiten und Gästebucheinträgen aus dem social network ‚netlog‘ zusammen. 7 Die Verfasser der Beiträge sind zum Teil Sprecher aus Korpus 1; ansonsten wurden sie nach Alter, Wohnort und eigener Herkunftsbezeichnung so ausgewählt, dass sie weitestgehend dem Profil der Sprecher aus Korpus 1 entsprechen. Die Einbeziehung verschiedener Korpora bietet den Vorteil, dass konzeptionell mündliche Daten in unterschiedlicher medialer Realisierung ausgewertet werden können. Anhand der Daten aus dem social network ist es möglich, Anglizismen in Kiezdeutsch aus einer weiteren Modalität zu analysieren und so beispielsweise Aussagen zur graphematischen Integration bzw. zu Verschriftlichungsstrategien von Anglizismen in einer multiethnischen Jugendsprache wie Kiezdeutsch zu treffen. Für die Untersuchung der Korpora sind folgende Fragen leitend: ƒ In welchen kommunikativen Situationen treten Anglizismen auf? ƒ Mit welchem Ziel werden Anglizismen von den Jugendlichen eingesetzt? ƒ Gibt es in den Korpora stabile Konstruktionen oder immer wiederkehrende Redewendungen? aufdecken ƒ In welchem Verhältnis stehen Anglizismen und weitere Entlehnungen, z.B. aus den Muttersprachen der Eltern der Kiezdeutschsprecher? Bei der Analyse der kommunikativen Situationen, in denen Anglizismen verwendet werden, treten einige Untersuchungsbereiche als besonders fruchtbar hervor: Bereiche ritueller Kommunikation wie Begrüßungen, Verabschiedungen und Anreden sowie aus dem Englischen entlehnte Formalismen und Phrasen. Auf diese Bereiche wird sich die folgende Untersuchung beschränken.

7

Laut eigener Angaben ist ‚netlog’ ein „soziales Portal für mehr als 30 Millionen junger Menschen in Europa“ (, 23.11.2008), davon z.B. rund 2.700.000 deutsche Mitglieder und 4.500.000 türkische Mitglieder. ‚Netlog’ wirbt damit, dass über 80% der Mitglieder zwischen 14 und 25 Jahre alt seien (, 23.11.2008). In unserem Korpus gibt es ca. 140 verschiedene Benutzer. Die ‚netlog’-Profilseiten sind, sofern die Benutzer dies nicht anders eingestellt haben, öffentlich zugänglich. Die „Sprachregeln“ auf ‚netlog’ besagen, dass Inhalte auf den deutschen Seiten nur auf Deutsch und Englisch veröffentlicht werden dürfen, vgl. , 23.11.2008). Zu Social Networking Sites und dem dortigen Sprachgebrauch siehe Boyd / Ellison (2007) oder Merchant (2001).

104

Eva Wittenberg & Kerstin Paul

5. Auswertung und Analyse 5.1. Überblick Im Folgenden zeigen wir, dass englisches Sprachmaterial genauso wie auch Ausdrücke anderer Sprachen in der SNS-Kommunikation eine wichtige stilistische Rolle spielen, die eng mit der Identitätsbildung Jugendlicher mit Migrationshintergrund zusammenhängt. Wir argumentieren, dass türkischarabische Elemente in Kiezdeutsch für eine multiethnische Selbstverortung der Jugendlichen sorgen, während Anglizismen zu einem Großteil als jugendsprachliche Elemente oder als vom Black English bzw. Hip-Hop-Slang beeinflusste Stilisierungen zu interpretieren sind. In unserer Analyse folgen wir Auer (1998) und Androutsopoulos (2004), indem wir ‚Alternation‘ und ‚Einfügung‘ (‚insertion‘) unterscheiden. Letztere zeichnet sich dadurch aus, dass Lexeme oder Wendungen einer Lehnsprache in die muttersprachliche Kommunikation eingeflochten werden. ‚Alternation‘ hingegen ist bidirektional: Die Konversation wechselt frei zwischen Kiezdeutsch bzw. deutscher Umgangssprache und fremden Elementen, beispielsweise türkischen oder arabischen Begriffen. Kiezdeutschsprecher sind zwar zu einem großen Teil mehrsprachig (mit Deutsch und der Muttersprache ihrer Eltern, z.B. Türkisch oder Arabisch), weshalb man Alternation zwischen diesen beiden Sprachen erwarten könnte. Aber es zeigt sich, dass Deutsch in den untersuchten SNS-Kommunikationen und in den mündlichen Daten allein quantitativ so stark überwiegt, dass Ausdrücke und Wendungen in anderen Sprachen als klare Instanzen von Einfügungsprozessen gesehen werden können. 5.2

Ein Beispiel

Der folgende Ausschnitt aus der Selbstbeschreibung auf einer Profilseite veranschaulicht sehr gut, wie eine multiethnische Identität aussehen kann und mit welchen sprachlichen Mitteln der Schreiber seine voice gestaltet: 1)

[BERLINEromantiker] EYYY ICH BIN 1,73m UND SEHR SEHR SPORTLICH ICH BIN STOLZER 100% PAKISTANER guckt mal video an DAS IST PAKISTAN MEIN LAND MEIN STOLZZZZZZZ NAtional hymneeeee wallah wer probleme hat soll zu mir kommen

Anglizismen in einer multiethnischen Jugendsprache

105

aber seh nicht soo aus wie paki aber kann auch türkisch verstehen und reden mit mit Türken aufgewachsen hehe wallah TÜRKEI und PAkISTAN best friendssss

Der Schreiber dieses Eintrags äußert sowohl starken Nationalstolz in Bezug auf Pakistan, das Herkunftsland seiner Eltern, als auch Sympathien für die Türkei. Hinzu kommt sein Nickname „BERLINEromantiker“, mit dem er sich auch in seiner Heimatstadt verortet und nicht eine ethnisierende Botschaft in sein Pseudonym integriert wie viele andere (vgl. Pseudonyme wie PAKI_BOY_LIKE_ME o.ä.). Doch vor allem sprachlich ist diese Selbstbeschreibung äußerst interessant, denn der Schreiber nutzt verschiedene Strategien, um das Gesagte zu intensivieren sowie authentisch und spontan wirken zu lassen: „BERLINEromantiker“ benutzt graphische Mittel wie Großbuchstaben und Buchstabenreihungen, um Einheiten voneinander abzugrenzen und besonders wichtige Abschnitte zu betonen. Das ursprünglich aus dem Arabischen stammende, jedoch auch unter türkischen Jugendlichen und in Kiezdeutsch verbreitete Lexem (wallah eine Bekräftigungsformel, wörtlich ‚bei Gott‘) ist zum einen die Demonstration seiner Aussage, er sei mit Türken aufgewachsen, zum anderen aber auch Ausdruck seiner voice — er benutzt eine Formel, die typisch ist für sein Umfeld. Typische Phrasen, die an Kanak Sprak erinnern (wer Probleme hat soll zu mir kommen), vermitteln das Bild eines ‚harten Jungen von der Straße‘. Kiezdeutsche Merkmale wie der Wegfall von Artikeln (guckt mal video an) sind Zeichen einer bewussten konzeptionellen Mündlichkeit bzw. Spontaneität. Anglizismen wie ey, best friends fügen eine weitere Färbung der voice hinzu, die mit ‚Coolness‘ umschrieben werden kann. Insgesamt hat der Schreiber für seine Vorstellung Mittel gewählt, die sehr ausdrucksstark sind und für die gegebene, sehr informelle Situation besser geeignet sind als ein orthographisch korrekter und sprachlich elaborierter Text, um das Ziel — Selbstdarstellung — erfolgreich umzusetzen. Die verschiedenen Rollen, die seine Identität ausmachen (Pakistaner, Türke, Berliner, Teenager), werden durch die verwendeten sprachlichen Mittel zusätzlich zur Textaussage selbst für die Leser sichtbar.

106

5.3

Eva Wittenberg & Kerstin Paul

Kommunikation — virtuell und face-to-face

In diesem Abschnitt wird gezeigt, dass virtuelle Kommunikation und face-to-face-Kommunikation für die Jugendlichen Hand in Hand gehen, was sich in den linguistischen Daten prominent wiederfindet. Die beiden Korpora geben wichtige informelle Kommunikationssituationen vieler Jugendlicher (und auch unserer Zielgruppe) wieder. Während es sich jedoch bei Korpus 1 um flüchtige, nicht-öffentliche face-to-faceKommunikation handelt, ist Korpus 2 digital, öffentlich und computermediatisiert. 8 Soziale Netzwerke sind auch ein Thema in den Selbstaufnahmen der Jugendlichen, was zeigt, dass ‚netlog’ wichtige soziale Aufgaben (z.B. Demonstration von Freundschaft, Sanktionen bei Streit) in den Interaktionen der Jugendlichen übernimmt. Dabei gibt es bestimmte Regeln, und Handlungen haben festgelegte soziale Bedeutungen, z.B. ist das Schreiben von Gästebucheinträgen (kommis) eine Freundschaftsdemonstration (vgl. Beispiel 2. Das Beenden von Freundschaften oder das Austragen von Streit ist durch „Blocken“ (eine Funktion in Instant-Messaging-Programmen wie MSN, bei der man den Nachrichteneingang von Kontakten sperren kann) möglich, wie in Beispiel 3: 9 2)

[MuH9Wt_13] 390 äh nur weil sie sie bei netlog ANgeschrieben hat, 391 sie tun ein auf FREUNde! Sie schreiben sisch KOMmis, 392 dies das die is mit ihr (verTRAgen) ey HALlo sie is eine BITCH.

3)

[MuH9Wt_13] 1392 danach sie meinte msn zu mir du überTREIBST voll, 1393 isch meinte ach so, 1394 okeh ISCH übertreibe? 1395 dann hab isch sie einfach geBLOCKT, 1396 weißte?

8

Zur Einordnung der Chat- und Internetkommunikation vgl. u.a. Storrer (2001), Thimm (2001).

9

Die Sprecher wurden auf zwei verschiedene Arten anonymisiert: Diejenigen Sprecher, die das Aufnahmegerät hatten, wurden nach Wohnort und Geschlecht kodiert; alle anderen, indem nur die Initialen belassen wurden und verschiedene Namen durchnummeriert wurden; Oxxxx und O2xxxx sind demnach verschiedene Sprecher. Die Zeilennummern korrespondieren mit Zeilen in den Korpus-Transkripten, die sich momentan im Aufbau befinden.

Anglizismen in einer multiethnischen Jugendsprache

107

Insgesamt ist ein soziales Netzwerk wie ‚netlog’ für die Jugendlichen eine Möglichkeit, für sich Regeln des Umgangs miteinander zu definieren, die durch die dem Medium innewohnende Distanz aber den Charakter des Ausprobierens behält. Dies illustriert Beispiel 4 sehr gut: 4)

[MuH9Wt_13] 1434 GUCKma, 1435 es haben sisch SO viele bitches bei mir geSCHLEIMTJxxx, 1436 GUCKma, 1437 isch hab schon SO lange netlog, 1438 isch pass AUF, 1439 mit WEM isch schreibe, 1440 mit WEM isch kontakt habe und WER mir kommis schreibt

Beispiele 2 bis 4 zeigen, dass eine Analyse der mündlichen Kommunikation der Jugendlichen erst durch die Einbeziehung von SNS-Daten vervollständigt werden kann, da die sozialen Interaktionen der Teenager auf beiden Ebenen stattfinden und diese Kommunikationssituationen untrennbar miteinander verflochten sind. 5.4

Sprachliche Routinen und Rituale

Verschiedene Interaktionsrituale wie Begrüßungen und Verabschiedungen sind besonders saliente Positionen, um durch lexikalische Entlehnungen und andere Stilmittel zur Identitätsdemonstration benutzt zu werden (Antos 1987: 11). Diese sind durch die Textsorte ‚Gästebucheintrag‘ in Korpus 2 sehr frequent. Im hier benutzten SNS-Korpus zeigen sich diese Strategien, aber außerdem auch multilinguale Doppelungen. Durch den stark ritualisierten Status von Begrüßungen und Verabschiedungen bietet sich in diesen Kommunikationsabschnitten eine besonders wirkungsvolle Möglichkeit, Routinen zu verfremden und auf diese Weise zusätzliche soziale Bedeutungen zu transportieren (vgl. Wiese 2006b). Dabei sind verschiedene Strategien zu beobachten. Zum einen werden arabische und türkische Formeln in einen sonst fast ausschließlich deutschen Text eingefügt. Typische Formeln sind: ƒ „vay“: ein emphatischer Ausruf des Erstaunens, ähnlich wie „ey“/ „oh“ ƒ „salam aleikum“: türkisch/arabisch ‚guten Tag‘

108

Eva Wittenberg & Kerstin Paul

ƒ „hadi“: türkisch ‚los jetzt‘, typische Abschiedsformel ƒ „kib“: (nur schriftlich), Abkürzung für „kendine iyi bak“, türkisch für ‚pass gut auf dich auf‘ ƒ „çüş“: türkisch ‚los jetzt‘, ebenfalls häufige Abschiedsformel ƒ „yallah“: türkisch/arabisch ‚los jetzt‘ Neben der Einfügung solcher Formeln in einen sonst deutschen Text wie in Beispiel 6 werden englische und arabisch-türkische Elemente auch kombiniert: SilveRBaCk_65 verknüpft eine arabische Verabschiedung (hadi kib) mit dem englischen bye. Während jedoch bye, wie auch die restlichen im Korpus vorkommenden Anglizismen (hey, byebye, peace) Elemente alltäglicher Jugend- oder Umgangssprache sind, ist hadi kib eindeutig ethnolektal konnotiert, insbesondere die Abkürzung kib, die Außenstehende erst entschlüsseln müssen, fungiert als Erkennungszeichen und Geheimcode: „By making use of a limited linguistic resource, speakers project ‚exclusive‘ social identities.“ (Androutsopoulos 2004: 9). Beispiele dafür finden sich in den folgenden Gästebucheinträgen: 5)

[YounG_Bisi] vay bruda ais klar?

6)

[SilveRBaCk_65] vaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay ne is alles klar moruk was treibst du so alles gute nachträglich bin heute erst wieder gekommen konnte dir leider nicht vorher schreiben naja hadi kib bye

7)

[__FRiiQ_SiiSTAHZ_] baibai und LG

8)

[Cemiii58] hadi cus kanns dich ja ma melden baybay

9)

[KhudaKeLiye] salam a leikum .. shit aldda hast du wenige einträge ... ich lass mal grüße da man.. >> so jz siehts voller aus lan hahahah

Anglizismen in einer multiethnischen Jugendsprache

109

Eine weitere Tendenz spiegelt sich in den Beispielen 7 und 8 wider: Die Schreiber bedienen sich unkonventioneller Schreibstrategien, die in Abschnitt 5.5 näher diskutiert werden sollen. Die Erkenntnisse für Begrüßungen und Verabschiedungen lassen sich auch auf Anreden bzw. Kosenamen übertragen. Im folgenden Beispiel 10 ist ebenfalls eine multilinguale Doppelung enthalten (baby und habibi; habibi ist arabisch für ‚Liebling‘ (weibliche Person), hier als Habii!!ii!!iiBt3 graphisch verfremdet). 10)

[Misses_Dara_Bubamara] Habii!!ii!!iiBt3...?! ii miiss yOu du feHLst miir..najja Liieb diiCh BeBii

Beim folgenden Beispiel 11, einem Ausschnitt aus einer Sequenz, die damit endet, dass die Freundin von KevinKing007 mit ihm Schluss macht, ist die Anrede sogar auf Türkisch (aşkım bedeutet ‚meine Liebe‘), Englisch und Deutsch an den Anfang gesetzt — ein starkes Intensivierungsmittel, mit dem der Schreiber die Tiefe seiner Gefühle zu unterstreichen versucht. 11)

[KevinKing007] Askiim Baby Schatz Ich Liebe Dich soOoOo sehr ich weiß ich bin oft nicht einfach aber ich liebe dich einfach zu sehr ich habe einfach nur angst das ich dich durch irgendeinen anderen verliere! Ich Schwöre Askiim ich liebe dich und werde dich niemals vergessen ich bin immer für dich da!!

Ein weiterer häufiger und ebenfalls stark ritualisierter Kommunikationsanlass sind Geburtstagswünsche. Hier überwiegt das englische birthday mit Varianten wie b-day. „Geburtstag“ kommt im Vergleich selten vor, dafür markant sind aber Doppelungen aus türkisch und englisch, vgl. Beispiel 12: 12)

[snaiper651] Happy B-Day dogumgünün kutlu olsun Herzlichen Glückwunsch zum geburtstag

Die dreimalige Wiederholung des Glückwunsches in drei Sprachen dient der Intensivierung des Wunsches.

110

Eva Wittenberg & Kerstin Paul

Ebenfalls markant ist die Tatsache, dass sehr häufig englische Phraseologismen auftreten, wie friends forever oder much love mit Varianten: 13)

[xXxPlayBoyLuder93xXx] haii meine süße alles liebe zub b-day ich wünsche dir alles liebe und viel glück noch in deinem weitern leben friends 4-ever liebe dich

14)

[lilshawty_GblaqqConnectionZ_] na meıne socke wıe gehtssssss allez jutee zum 16 bdaaaaaaaaaaaaaay much luuV&dıe 14 tage ım balıkkesır mıt dır warn hamma hıhıhı