Beamer, Dressman, Bodybag

On the unexpected joys of Denglisch, Berlinglish & global Englisch

Whenever I leave my Berlin apartment, the first thing I see is a sign saying CHICKEN HAUS BURGER; the second is a café blackboard announcing: « You can’t buy happiness but you can buy CROIFFLE and that’s kind of the same thing. » A billboard advertises an upcoming film as « ein STATEMENT für GIRLPOWER »; one shop promises a wide range of Funsocken. Rather more disturbing — particularly here in Neukölln, a neighbourhood copiously populated by leftie Americans and families from the Middle East — is the Arabic-German barber shop called WHITE BOSS. And when I go downtown to the bookstore where I occasionally host readings, the only good coffee nearby is served by a place unbelievably named PURE ORIGINS.

I am at my desk, red pen in hand, mulling over a question of usage. The German word for pedestrians is Fußgänger. Do Berlin expats know that? Have I ever overheard one say it? If the expats won’t understand it, I can’t leave it in this little news feature about traffic reform.

It’s a strange gig, editing pages for Berlin’s English-language print monthly. We assume our readers know a few German phrases — many have lived here for years — but we cannot assume fluency, obviously, otherwise we’d be publishing in German, or indeed not at all. Using bits of local language in our pages avoids repetition and adds colour; it also helps generate a sense of community — this isn’t just some anglo mag, it’s a mag for Berliners, auf Englisch. It’s a rather ironic way for me to pay the bills. I did German history at university; I moved here to inhabit the land of Goethe, Neu! and Judith Schalansky. And here I am now, making my living — as an editor, occasional translator, anglophone critic of German literature — in the cracks between the languages, materially reliant on the existence of thousands of Berliners and Berlin-watchers who don’t speak the national tongue.

Which is not to say that Berlin’s English-language readers — the natively anglophones plus many whose first language is Swedish, Spanish, Turkish or Arabic — do not know German at all. The Berlinglish they speak is informal English, slightly simplified, full of swears, nightlife slang and loan words — mostly adopted from German. Knowing the contours of this dialect is no small part of my editing work. Taken together, its German-to-English loans register all the points of cultural interface that an expat life simply cannot avoid — Rundfunk, Finanzamt, Anmeldung — as well as some that have made it across on account of their own attractive promises: Spätkauf, Flohmarkt, Falafelteller, Wegbier.

The English spoken by those newcomers who settle here and end up making some German friends and studying the language — it also absorbs subtler influences from German. The other day my friend S., an American Berliner, said that he had noticed his English-language social circle starting to use the word « spontaneously » wrong. When Germans say they’ll organise a social event spontan, they mean they’ll work out the details at short notice. To socialise spontaneously, in English, means something rather different. But S. and I and our Neukölln friends have started using it in the sense of spontan. « OK cool text me Sunday and we’ll choose a place spontaneously. » This error is becoming part of our little language, our ultra-local dialect, just among us.

Of course, like anywhere else, it’s the movement of language in the other direction that tends to raise hackles. Recently a share-flat ad went viral for demanding that anyone who moves in must use anglicism-free German. The conservative former health minister, Jens Spahn, hit the headlines complaining that there were cafés in Berlin where you could not order without knowing English. When I first arrived in Germany, I too was cranky about Denglisch, complaining to any German I could find about both Anglizismen and the refusal of certain expats to try learning the language. I was determined for them to understand how different I was from those other foreigners, ruining their city and language.

I have since stopped taking Denglisch so seriously. In the highly multicultural, highly Jens Spahn-baiting district of Neukölln, Denglisch has even begun to feel normal, until the moments when it doesn’t. Anytime a language shifts its borders, japesters and salespeople rush into that new space. German social media loves to mock awful Denglisch marketing attempts: « Law is in the air », announced one otherwise German legal academy ad. But when the bilingual puns are good, they’re good — and enhanced by the thrill of belonging. I love this one billboard ad for classic indie radio that reads Everybody hörts (« everyone listens to it »), and I love it not only because I like the pun, but because I feel a surge of pride that I’m in on the joke, that maybe I do really speak German. This is exactly the effect that they’re going for, I suppose, just flipped 180 degrees.

I can certainly understand the novelty factor. Growing up in Australia, I took to learning German with inexplicable vigor. There was no particular reason, personal or geopolitical, to do so. My friends from football said it was easy, and then I liked the teacher, and then I liked the language. Nobody in my family had a foreign language; nobody I knew, except my teacher, spoke German. I read a quote dubiously attributed to Charlemagne: « to learn another language is to possess a second soul. » Generally an inhibited person, I was able to open up in oral exams — perhaps I lacked the linguistic guile to dodge difficult questions. I watched music videos online, endangering my otherwise closely guarded indie credentials by enjoying some genuinely silly German pop. Doing so in a foreign language meant a curious alchemy took place: I was incapable of finding anything kitsch. Cologne-area dad rock, no problem. When the YouTube algorithm forced soap opera heartthrob Jörn Schlönvoigt’s attempted pop crossover Das Gegenteil von Liebe on me, I slurped it right down. I even took a liking to Germany’s premier comedy a cappella group, an aging quintet by the name of Wise Guys.

Recently I pulled up Wise Guys again because I remembered they had a song called Denglish — poor bastards, I thought, worrying back in 2006 with no idea of how anglicised their world would become. It’s a cheeky little number that sends up both Denglisch’s faux trendiness and the heavy-handed backlash against it. (One line goes: « Und gib, dass Microsoft bald wieder ‘Kleinweich’ heißt. ») I thought it would be perfect for this essay — a harbinger of linguistic doom with a cute ironic twist. But when I listened it through, I found that their mid-2000s anglicisms were mostly stale now, and rarely ever used at all.

At the moment, German newspapers describe any kind of drama as ein Shitstorm: who knows if that is here to stay. What leads a loan word to travel? Is it the fantasy of foreign places, the thrill of the exotic? Or is it a culture’s perception of its own shortcomings? Preeminent recent anglicisms in contemporary German — words like recycelt, Streamlining, queer, Smash, Gender-Wokismus, cringe, Slay, Sneaker-Release, Content-Manager — hint at a varied and vivid set of contact points.

Being an English native speaker in Berlin means wading daily through a sea of linguistic nonsense. « Be Coffee My Monkey » orders one café; another says « Make Coffee Love Magic ». At one of those cafés you might overhear Germans saying things like « das ist ein Gamechanger! » and « Hast du’s geliket? » and « Oh my God was für ein Fuck-My-Life-Moment ». On bad days, I worry that English has turned primarily into a status symbol — a tool of pure Habitus, a means for young elites to signify their cosmopolitanism and savviness. On days like that, it’s also hard to avoid the feeling that English — the language I inhabit, the tool I use to pay the rent and tell my wife I love her — is like too little butter spread out across too many bits of toast.

In her novel Flights, Olga Tokarczuk wryly marvels that there are countries out there where people have English as a mother tongue. Other Europeans might speak English when they travel, but they always have their own languages tucked away for private use. Anglophones, by contrast, have nothing to fall back on: « How lost they must feel in the world, where all instructions, all the lyrics of all the stupidest possible songs, all the menus, all the excruciating pamphlets and brochures — even the buttons in the lift! — are in their private language, » she writes. « Wherever they are, people have unlimited access to them — they are accessible to everyone and everything! »

In the battle of the languages, then, this absolute anglophone triumph might be as Pyhrric a victory as a victory can be. Ease of access means seeing the worst of yourself plastered everywhere; it’s a privilege, sure, but a source of embarrassment and solitude as well. If das Grindset is what winning looks like, then count me tired of winning.

At my local café, they do great coffee, Aussie style. Just imagine my horror when I figured out why. In one of Flights’s airport scenes, Tokarczuk bemoans the horror of encountering your compatriots abroad: Olga mate, try being an Australian in Europe! Nevertheless, in what can only be described as a fearless act of radical anti-neocolonialism, I insist on speaking German when I’m there. So do the baristas. There’s no chance — my accent being as it is — that they haven’t seen through me. My coffee order of choice doesn’t help in that regard. « Hallo, » I say each time, « uh, ein Flat White bitte ». « Ein Flat White, Kuhmilch? » the Aussie barista asks. « Ja, Kuh. » Hearing us both butcher the language of Goethe and Schiller while absolutely nailing the pronunciation of « flat white » would surely leave Jens Spahn begging us to please, please just speak in English. But that, mein lieber Jens, is something that I simply will not do.

On days I don’t spend fretting over the soul of both German and my native tongue, I can find great pleasure in Denglish — in seeing, that is, my own language made camp. (One is tempted, here in the city of Brecht, to speak of « alienation effects ».) It can even be re-enchanting. And sometimes the anglicisers have a point! One would much rather talk of race than Rasse, a word that Germans use for dogs. The fact that baby sounds a million times cuter than Säugling must be a boon for the German parent-child bond. As for Finger Food: Hell yeah, brother! Food for your fingers!

Related as they are, German and English are easily sutured onto one another — but this is a recipe for misunderstanding. I have learned to automatically correct false friends (intensiv means « intense » not « intensive »; a großes Thema is a « big issue » not a « big topic »). Sometimes, slips between the languages dramatically shift the tone. The German word Insel means « island », not « incel », and while I’m very much aware of that, it’s still uncanny to see a shop called COMPUTERINSEL — « I thought they all were, » quipped my wife — or signs pointing to Museuminsel one direction and Fischerinsel the other. (Which way, Western man?) When you are used to encountering « Praxis » in the humanities-grad-school context, it is a thrill to encounter a dental Praxis, or to hear a German say they have Handball Praxis. For anyone who’s spent time in New York, where Yiddish has brought Germanic vocabulary the long way around into English, the German word Schmuck — which means « jewelry » — has substantially different connotations, rendering the sign Schmuckgalerie on Berlin jewelry stores particularly striking.

I like how English loan words jam the rules of German grammar. I once read a discussion thread on a forum where people argued whether fighten — preferred by many German boxing fans, for some reason, over kämpfen — should take the past-participle gefightet, gefighted or gefaughtet. Certain German verbs are separable, which means you split the two parts in some sentence structures or in past-participle form. (Ausbeuten: ausgebeutet.) But do you separate imported English compound words? Once you start saying downloaden for « to download », you have to consider whether the past form is gedownloadet or downgeloadet. More recently I spent fifteen minutes of my only given time on God’s green earth trying to work out whether Queerbaiting would be separable when conjugated.

•  Du baitest queer.
• Sie baitet queer.
• Niemand hat die Absicht, queerzubaiten.
• O Harry Styles, bitte, baite mich nicht queer!

Linguistically speaking, anglicisms in German take a range of different forms. One kind involves straight loan words: das Hobby, die Ladys. Another is called a calque — an English phrase that has been translated unidiomatically into German. In this case, all the words are still German, but they’ve been bent out of shape. Germans often say das passierte in 2002 not das passierte 2002, an imitation of English grammar. It used to be an error to translate « That makes sense » as Das macht Sinn — but now it’s German.

My favourite kind of anglicism is the Scheinanglizismus. Many languages across the world have these « pseudo-anglicisms », which consist of English phrases that are used in that language but don’t actually make sense in English. An overhead projector is called a Beamer here; a photo shoot is, rather alarmingly, a Shooting. During lockdown, the practice of working from home got dubbed das Homeoffice, much to the bafflement of Berlin’s UK contingent. A male model used to be called a Dressman, in a doublepseudo- anglicism: it’s the English verb « dress » tacked onto the elegant rump of « gentleman ». Best of all were short-lived attempts to market the messenger satchel to Germans as Bodybag.

These phony anglicisms have captured my imagination. My first instinct, upon arriving in Berlin, had been to take a stand against rapacious English in defense of plucky old German. But Bodybag, Beamer and co. have helped me to leave my humourlessly monoglot preconceptions behind. Dressman strikes me less as a point scored by English against German, and more as the construction of a whole new thing. Why consider languages as rivals, after all? You can borrow from one language and not lose your own. And while the specific matter of Denglisch clearly reflects broader inequalities and homogenising processes, it seems to lie downstream of all the really odious stuff. For one thing — unlike wealthy Anglo expats not trying to learn German, which I still think stinks — Denglisch appears to be largely self-inflected. If people here want to alienate their parents by talking about Influencer*innen and Relearning and Management, that seems primarily German-vs-German; if local marketers want to go around calling mobile phone contracts a Handyplan, well, I shan’t feel too guilty for finding that hilarious.

The longer I live between languages, the more I realise that language is roomy; people’s minds, and lives, are roomy. If homogenization has a kryptonite, it is not the closing of borders but the survival of plurality. Here in Berlin, a cosmos of authors make hay in the linguistic collision zones. The Japanese-born novelist and translator Yoko Tawada describes language in botanical terms — in her work, it evolves and grows as if in cracks between the paving. Uljana Wolf’s recent essay collection Etymologisches Gossip is powered by puns, associative threads and philolo-riffs taken from German as well as English. Ulrike Draesner’s poetry sequence Doggerland, meanwhile, recreates that ancient Anglo-Germanic land bridge through a polyphonic mixture of German, English and their shared linguistic ancestors. I went to see her live and it was unforgettably unsettling.

D                 AUSDEUTSCHEN                                       E
spannen     um zu äußern (outer, utter) dass   stretch
                    stretch etwas (t-hing) ihnen (pleases) gefällt
                    weil es hängt oder eine angel ist (hinge)
                    geben sie viel (leave it) auf

My first taste of English as lingua franca came in 2011 during my first visit to Berlin, the first proper period of time I’d spent in a non-anglophone country. I spent the whole summer in the company of fellow NGO interns and Erasmus students, a big horde of us who came in from all over Europe for two giddy months. We all spoke English together — a specific, trans-European kind of English. I did not even notice it until once, while chatting on the phone to my brother in Australia, I said: « Your mate Ben, he plays very well the guitar, no? »

Global English has been theorised extensively. In 1995, French businessman Jean-Paul Nerrière coined the term « globish » to describe a « decaffeinated » version of English spoken by non-native businesspeople abroad. In the wake of Brexit, a public debate broke out over what it meant for English as a European language — and as an official EU language — now that the UK would not be around to maintain its standards. (A remarkable act of Republic-of-Ireland-erasure, but ah sure look it.) A well-publicised report was released by Jeremy Gardner, former senior translator at the European Court of Auditors, enumerating a list of standard deviations from British English norms common across the continent: an overuse of gerunds (« I am coming from Italy »), understanding « actual » to mean « current » instead of « real », and so on. Some suggested that « Euro English », English without the English, was actually a pidgin.

English, as the American author Leslie Dunton-Downer observes in The English is Coming! (2010), is not just a language with more loan words than « native » ones — it is also a language with more non-native speakers than native ones. My relationship to the language is probably less typical than that of the bloke who named his barber shop WHITE BOSS. Per capita, English now belongs not to me or Mr. Gardner, but to those who’ve gone and learned it. In her collection Hardly War (2016), the currently-Leipzig-based poet Don Mee Choi writes: « I am a foreigner who writes in English / Because English is a foreigner like me. » English as a foreigner: it’s quite an attractive idea. Perhaps being a native speaker of English means learning to be at home in something that everyone else has a claim on — like having grown up in Stratford-upon-Avon or Las Vegas (or, I suppose, East Berlin).

I always used to think that lingua franca meant Latin, but I’ve come to learn differently. The original Lingua Franca was no official elite language but instead a pidgin used for trade around the eastern Mediterranean from around the eleventh century throughout the early modern period — or, more accurately, an array of different pidgins, which mixed elements of Latin via Italian with bits of Arabic, Greek, Turkish and other languages. Lingua Franca, as Dunton-Downer notes, was not a « standardized or codified language » but instead a spectrum of dialects that varied according to location, purpose, and time. I wonder if this might be a healthier way to think about English (and German) today. The loan word, the calque, the bilingual pun: they are all signs of a shared set of references. Thanks to international football fandom, I know the phrase cross and inshallah better than most English proverbs. For those of us who grew up with the internet, in Europe and beyond, web culture has generated its own international Kulturnation: an online German 32-year-old and I will both, for better or worse, understand what is meant by « emu lesbian finally milkshake ducked », while neither of our mothers would have a clue. Young Germans’ use of anglicisms is most basically the natural consequence of hanging out online. But just as globalisation renders some things more (superficially) similar, it also generates new kinds of locality. Berlinglish is a sign of having lived here with variously open eyes and ears. It is a minor, local English — an English set up to be shared.

When I edit for the magazine, one German word I never take out — and occasionally add in — is Wahlberliner*in: Berliner by choice. It’s a lovely made-up word for anyone who’s decided to live here without having been born here. Occasionally I feel guilty to include it: I don’t think it really passes the Wegbier-expat editorial usage test. But I like it, sentimental as I am, and perhaps it wouldn’t hurt our readers too much to go look something up for once.