Nadja Grebe

The Use of Anglicisms in the German Magazine FOCUS Nadja Grebe

Seminar paper from the year 2010 in the subject English - Pedagogy, Didactics, Literature Studies, grade: 1,0, Ernst Moritz Arndt University of Greifswald (Institut für Fremdsprachliche Philogien), course: Contact Linguistics, language: English, abstract: Most of all linguists who find themselves engaged in Contact Linguistics agree upon the fact that the influence of the English language on German is constantly increasing and has especially risen during the last decades of the 20th century. (cf. Viereck 1980: 11; Götzeler 2008: 58-59) Due to the close collaboration in the political and economical sector, the contact between the two language regions has become more intense and has thus led to a higher frequency of borrowings from English. As a direct consequence of this process, a public discussion on the drawbacks of the use of anglicisms in German has started and found his peek in the foundation of the Verein Deutsche Sprache formerly called the Verein zur Rettung der deutschen Sprache in 1997. (cf. Götzeler 2008: 61) The increasing presence of loanwords, as commonly believed, as well as the ongoing public discussion on their use is reason enough to analyze the use of anglicisms in the German language by using the example of the German newsmagazine FOCUS. In this context it shall be examined, whether the frequency of anglicisms in 2009 is higher than the frequency in 1993. Furthermore, as the corpus consists of texts from two different categories, namely Deutschland and Modernes Leben, numerical differences concerning those sections is also subject of the study. As a result, proof for the following theses is expected: 1. The frequency of anglicisms used in 2009 is higher than in 1993. 2. The number of borrowings in the section Modernes Leben will be greater than in the section Deutschland.