This chapter deals with the impact of English influence on German. The influence will be discussed first in relation to level of language, domain and national variety. Then the distribution of English transfers across the speech community will be discussed, and some attention will be paid to the possibility that they are contributing to communication barriers.

Anglo-American influence in a general context

A language can undergo renewal and enrichment through neologisms, semantic shift (especially extension of meanings) and transference from other languages. Transference of items and elements is the result of culture contact. Virtually all languages have had periods of large-scale language contact. Manifestations of this in the history of the German language have been the Latin influence on Old High German and sixteenth-century German, as well as the French influence on Middle High German and eighteenth-century German. There have been epochs of nationalistic purism (Nüssler 1979). One such period was the seventeenth century, when writers who saw themselves as language planners grouped themselves into Sprachgesellschaften (language societies), one of whose tasks was to develop a German free of foreign (especially Romance) elements. During the nineteenth century many words of ‘non-Germanic’ origin were replaced by ‘pure Germanic’ lexemes (see Townson 1992).

The present period of openness to internationalization and foreign influence in Germany may be seen partly as a reaction to the xenophobia of the National Socialist era. Moreover, it is a consequence of post-war political and cultural developments. By the end of the Second World War, the German language had lost most of its international status in the West to English (as had French) and some of its position in the East temporarily to Russian.