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German ‘Non-Word’ of 2019 Posted by Constanze on Jan 15, 2020
Linguists from the Technische Universität Darmstadt have decided on the German Unwort des Jahres (the ‘non-word of the year’) 2019. The Unwort des Jahres is ‘Klimahysterie’. At the end of every year, the GfdS (German Language Association) picks a word for its Wort des Jahres (Word of the Year). This is a word that’s been…
German Word of the Year 2019 Runners Up Posted by Constanze on Jan 1, 2020
Guten Tag! Each year, the Gesellschaft für deutsche Sprache (GfdS) – The German Language Association – picks a word as their Wort des Jahres – ‘Word of the Year’. This is often a word related to a prominent topic in the country during the year, and is usually interesting from a linguistic perspective, too. The…
The Origin Of The Snow Globe Posted by Constanze on Dec 25, 2019
Frohe Weihnachten (Merry Christmas)! We’ve looked at a huge range of German Christmas traditions on the blog over the years, and if you want to indulge yourself simply click the tag Christmas for them all to come up! In fact, many Christmas traditions as we know them today originated in Germany or Austria. These include…
Gender-Neutral German: Das Gendersternchen Posted by Constanze on Dec 18, 2019
Guten Tag! You may have seen words like this in German: Einwohner*innen, Mieter*innen, Lehrer*innen. What’s the little star in the middle all about? This is called the Gendersternchen, and it’s what we’re going to talk about in today’s post. As language learners soon find out, German is a very gendered language. That means, not only…
German Word of the Year 2019 Posted by Constanze on Dec 11, 2019
Guten Tag! Today we will look at the Wort des Jahres in Germany. Each year, the Gesellschaft für deutsche Sprache (GfdS) – The German Language Association – picks a word as their Wort des Jahres – ‘Word of the Year’. This is often a word related to a prominent topic in the country during the…
My Top German Songs of the Decade! Posted by Constanze on Dec 4, 2019
Guten Tag! Not only is the year drawing to a close, but so is the decade! To celebrate the end of the ’10s in style, Transparent Language is putting together a big, multilingual playlist of the best tunes of the decade – and we need your help in selecting some good German ones! For example…
The Germans on the Germans: North & South Posted by Constanze on Nov 27, 2019
Hallo! Every country has names for people from different regions within that country. In this post we will look at what people from northern Germany call people from southern Germany, and vice-versa (for a post on east and west Germany, click here!). *Please note: The point of learning about these words is not to encourage anybody…