Multicultural Germany
The Importance of Multiculturalism in the German Language
October 05th, 2015
Germany, thanks to immigration, has become one of the most multicultural countries in Europe, and this is of course affecting the language. In everyday life multilingualism, which consists of switching from one language to another because of circumstances, may occurs. This keeps the language of Goethe up with the times.
Germany is the second most popular migration destination in the world, after the United States, and one out of every five people has at least partial roots outside of Germany.
Other cultures deeply influence German language. An example is the loss of the grammatical cases, which are slowly disappearing. It also occurs that wrong suffixes are used, or that are forgotten. And of course there are also changes in pronunciation.
How is it possible to change a language? Young people have a big influence on it, as sometimes they try to imitate a certain foreign pronunciation of German words to be accepted.
Other changes are due to the decreasing number of readers, which in turn leads German people to do grammatical mistakes. Again, the language can be influenced also by dialects, which have different grammatical features.
Some other changes are of course brought by the technological field, for this reason there are a lot of Anglicism. They were initially used a lot by young people or in business communication and then, from these restricted fields, they spread to everyday language becoming part of it.
It is important to say that all these differences represent a stimulus for language innovation, as they make the language always up to date and allow it to express new concepts and situations.
We can definitely affirm that multiculturalism has great and positive effects, which can bring important improvements to a language.
References and Links
Alice Desiderio, Berlin Global
