Tag Archives: Language
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…
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…
Writing ‘The’ In German Gets Account Blocked Posted by Constanze on Nov 20, 2019
Guten Tag! There are many false friends between German and English. False friends are words we recognise in German because they are spelled the same as an English word. They do not, however, mean the same as the English word. Sometimes this mix-up with false friends can lead to confusion, laughter, embarrassment… and sometimes, it…
The Germans on the Germans: East & West Posted by Constanze on Nov 13, 2019
Hallo! Every country has names for people from different regions within that country. Over the next few posts we’ll look at what words Germans have for other Germans, and why. In this post we will look at what people from eastern Germany call people from western Germany, and vice-versa. A follow-up post will look at…
Loaded German Words: Kraut Posted by Constanze on Oct 25, 2019
Guten Tag! Recently there was an uproar here in the UK when the official party for the pro-Brexit campaign put out a poster showing a photo of Angela Merkel, accompanied by the words ‘We did not win two world wars to be pushed around by a Kraut’. This was in reference to a phone call…
Germany’s ‘Free Body Culture’ Posted by Constanze on Oct 9, 2019
Guten Tag! Today the topic is die Nacktheit (nudity) in German culture, which is otherwise known as die Freikörperkultur or FKK – ‘free body culture’. Germany has a fairly relaxed attitude towards nudity and therefore you will see people go nude on beaches and in parks and saunas. There are saunas, for instance, where as…