KEY POINTS:
Hollywood made it the language of on-screen baddies.
For decades, Germans have glumly accepted routine abuse of their language and taken insults about it lying down, but not any more, it seems.
The campaign to defend Die Deutsche Sprache has not been launched by some obscure group of language professors, but from one of the main centres of German political power: the party of Chancellor Angela Merkel.
Her ruling conservative Christian Democrats are poised to copy France and enshrine the nation's language in the constitution. At their last party conference, the conservatives voted to add the words: "The language of the Federal Republic of Germany is German" to the constitution's 22nd Article, which proclaims that the capital is Berlin and the national flag is black, red and gold.
Defending the move, which has been criticised by immigrant groups and left-wing political parties, Annette Heubiger, one of the Christian Democrat MPs behind the proposal, insisted: "I think it is absolutely normal that the German language is written into the constitution. After all, it forms our cultural identity and the basis of our mental existence."
Merkel was among the few Christian Democrats to vote against the idea.
German conservatives say their attempts to have the language enshrined in the constitution are part of a drive to improve the integration of the country's 10 million foreigners. Its 1.7 million Turkish residents still have difficulties with German. "The learning and mastering of a national language is the key to successful and sustainable integration," Heubinger said.
And since 2006, Germany has been lobbying to have its language given official EU status alongside English and French.
But the move is also an attempt to guard against what many see as an insidious and virtually unstoppable corruption of German by "Denglish", the increasingly widespread incorporation of English words and phrases.
Denglish has infuriated the German academic world. The writer, Matthias Schreiber, recently described the phenomenon in Der Spiegel magazine as "a poisonous porridge of magma which is burying a whole cultural landscape beneath it".
It is not difficult to understand what he is on about. Denglish has turned the word for television compere into "talkmaster" and transmuted "download" into "downloaden", "babysitting" into "babysitten" and "brainstorming" into "brainstormen".
The marketing phrase designed to attract tourists to the German capital is the bafflingly idiotic "Be Berlin". To clamp down on teenage drinking, the authorities in Bavaria invented the slogan, "Be hard, drink soft!"
During the 2006 World Cup football tournament hosted by Germany, the Federal Transport Ministry plastered the country's motorways with the slogan "FAIRPLAY on the Autobahn". Statistics appear to justify the conservatives' concern. Opinion polls show that 74 per cent of Germans think Denglish should be avoided in everyday speech while another study, by Hanover University, found that 23 of the 100 most used words in German were in fact English.
But in German advertising, the increasing use of Denglish appears to have backfired. The slogan, "Come in and find out", adopted by a chain of German cosmetic stores, proved a failure. Studies revealed that most Germans' English was not up to the challenge and they understood the phrase to mean "Come in and go back out again".
Perhaps most unsettling was the phrase "Powered by emotion", used to advertise a private television channel. Consumer research showed that most Germans thought it was an up-to-date version of the Nazi slogan, "Kraft durch Freude", or "Strength through Joy".
Professor Walter Krmer of the German Language Association does not simply blame globalisation for the linguistic invasion.
"When Germans think about themselves, they often feel insecure," he explained. "English offers them security. To put it crudely, they would rather be thought of as half-Americans than complete Nazis."
- INDEPENDENT
