You only ever really realise how interconnected languages are once you step out of your own. I never really thought about how many anglicisms we have, until I saw how many German words you use in English.

And because things like these are super interesting, but very difficult if you don’t speak the other language, I’ve written a little article for you that showcases 10 English words that we use in our common day-to-day speech.

1. Cool

Cool, as in, something’s being awesome, has been around since forever. Well, not forever, but it’s definitely already been around when I was a child. And that’s at least a few decades.

2. Laptop

A lot of technical terms are directly borrowed, laptop just being one of them. Things such as download, app, computer, update are also our normal terms. We do have German equivalents for some (not all) of them, but it can genuinely sound a bit odd if you don’t use the anglicism.

3. Jogging

This one’s an interesting one – because you don’t even really call it jogging, do you? What we call Jogging, you call running. Which I always found odd. You’re not running while you’re running, are you? You’re, well jogging! That’s a different speed!

4. Chillen

Yes, we do chill in Germany – a relatively new (again, I say that, but I used it as a teenager) way of describing to loosely hang out with friends somewhere. There are way more anglicisms in youth speech now since social media has conquered the world – but I won’t name those here.

5. Deadline

This one’s an example for an anglicism that is slowly replacing the our German original term for the exact same thing. There are quite a few out there, too. Currently, it’s predominantly used in everyday speech and in work environments – our bureaucracy, however, still uses the German term.

6. Auspowern

What we also like to to is to Germanify it – after all, it needs to suit our oh-so-fun grammar. This is one example of it – it basically means to exhaust yourself and is made up of the prefix “aus”, which can mean off, out, over – and the English term “power”.

7. Babysitter

Not only do we use this, we also have a fitting verb that’s basically exactly the same, just with an -n at the end istead of an -r: babysitten – literally the act of, well, baby-sit.

8. Training

That’s an old one, too – and we use it exactly in the same context the original English word is used in, too. Predominantly in school, sport or work.

9. Flirting

Oh yes – do you want to sweet-talk someone, schmoozing up to someone who’s caught your attention? That’s flirting! Does it speak for itself, that we need to use an English term for something so social, when there’s the cliché of Germans being stone-cold and emotionless? Nah, probably just a coincidence.

10. Handy

I’m going to close the list with a humorous one. No, it’s not what you think. It’s a mobile phone. We’ve also stolen smartphone from you – but a lot of people (well, those of us who remember what came before a smartphone) are still calling it a Handy.

We actually call this last one a [Scheinanglizismus]¹ – basically a pseudo loan word. It looks like an English word (and might even be one, like the one above), but it’s actually not – or taken completely out of context. There are actually quite a few of those – I’ll teach you some more about them here!

[Picture by Kenny Eliason – thank you!]

1. Der Scheinanglizismus – “Schein” (in this context: illusoriness) and “Anglizismus” (well, angicism) – it’s the term for a word we use in German that looks like it’s English, but it isn’t – or it’s something completely out of context. ↩︎