The Americanization of British English and the Anglicization of German

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The British (generalization alert here) love to blame America for corrupting their culture. Already the US has inserted trick-or-treating into Halloween and Americanisms into the language.  

Or maybe I should say “we’ve inserted,” since I’m American. And also British, but my language is American, so yeah, if you want someone to blame–and it’s so satisfying to personalize these things–I’m available. My reach isn’t long enough for me to be responsible for even a small part, of that, but accuracy isn’t big in public life these days, so don’t worry about it. Picture me sitting on my couch right now, corrupting the language. 

I am a dangerous person.

But while we’re doing maybes, maybe I should’ve said “the English,” not “the British.” I’ve lived in Britain for more than 17 years and still struggle with what characteristics to file in which national folder. So until clarity whacks me on the head, let’s say it’s the British and wait for someone to correct me. And if I’m wrong, please do. Hearing from people is what makes writing this thing worth the effort.

Semi-relevant photo: The white cliffs of Dover, guarding England against an invasion of foreign words

 

What Americanisms are we talking about? 

A 2017 article from someplace deep inside Cambridge University (is that authoritative enough for you?) lists the use of guy, was like, and I’m good as having increased considerably. The use of closet (the British for that is wardrobe; you’re welcome), season (for TV shows), and right now had also increased but not as much. Annoying business-speak words and phrases like going forward and touch base showed–mercifully–no clear growth. 

What do I have against American business-speak? Two things: it uses words to say nothing and  it makes me want to throw things at people. But hey, life’s full of these small hazards. We struggle onward.

Less authoritatively, assorted British speakers mention the creepage of stores replacing shops, leaving British English with convenience stores and department stores even though people still talk about going to the shop. As a neighbor explained the difference to me, a store is still where you store things and a shop is where you shop for them. That’s the reason our village shop didn’t end up having the small used book store I wanted to set up. Instead it has a small used book stall, which isn’t a shop because it’s outside, in a weather-proof box, unattended, a bit like those little free libraries that have popped up around the US and Canada and can be found but not as often in other countries.   

I’ll admit to seeing logic in the shop/store distinction, but I still do my own shopping at a store. Or at least I think I do. Other people will have different opinions. 

An Americanism that doesn’t seem to be making much headway but that’s around enough to make a subset of British speakers shudder is the word gotten. To me, it’s such an invisible word that before I moved here I couldn’t have imagined anyone getting emotional about it, but I worked briefly with a purist who objected to my use of gotten, weighting her objections with such heavy doses of right and wrong, educated and ignorant that I created for extra spots to drop gotten into my sentences. 

 

Purity

To be clear: I’m not saying the British are a nation of disapproving pedants. As far as I know, you’ll find purists in any culture, along with the kind of people who drive them crazy, and there seems to be a balance between the two. In Britain, that means enough people adopt Americanisms to keep the purists satisfyingly upset. It’s hard to guess at the numbers, though. Dictionary-thumpers are over-represented in places where people comment on new and impure words. It’s their natural habitat. They list. They make their arguments. They shake their heads to indicate despair. The opposition? Most of them ignore the arguments and adopt the words they like, which is why no amount of sniping will ever convince a language to stay pure. 

And that, at long last, brings us to the reason why I mention German in my blog title. While I’ve been busy corrupting British English, purists in Germany are blaming the English language–pure users and impure ones alike–for what they call the idiot’s apostrophe.

The what? Well kidlets, I don’t know German, so this is all second hand, but from what I’ve read, the way German tells the world that someone’s in possession of something isn’t to add an apostrophe and an S to the someone, it’s to, ahem, decline the word for that someone. In other words, they change the ending of the word in a more intricate way–one that doesn’t involve apostrophes.

But Anglecisms have been creeping into German for some time and now the Council for German Orthography has decreed that as of 2025 it will be acceptable to use an apostrophe. Small businesses are already doing it, giving the world Andi’s Imbiss (Andi’s restaurant) and Kim’s Kiosk. And purists are having fits. One argued that relaxing the rules makes German more complicated by saying several different things can be correct at once. 

Can more than one thing be correct at once? Umm, I’d say so. It depends on time, place, and circumstance, but it’s not out of the question. 

Is this the beginning of the end of the German language? Possibly. If it is, will that destroy the world as we know it? Probably. Forget our overheating planet. Forget genocide and the rise of fascism. The end of the world is being brought to us courtesy of the humble apostrophe. 

64 thoughts on “The Americanization of British English and the Anglicization of German”

  1. actually (I’m whispering here) It’s the British who are corrupting the culture by adopting american customs. I grew up with Bonfire Night on Nov 5th which was always preceded by ‘Penny for the Guy’ which seems much more acceptable to me than hordes of little monsters extorting sweets on your own doorstep. I hare the ‘Trick’ part of trick or treat which can involve ‘egging’ the house of someone who doesn’t give ‘Candy’ (another word I don’t care for). Some of our big stores (ASDA) were for a while, American owned and introduced the UK to some of the most disgusting sweets and chocolate on the planet. I swear they changed the taste of Cadbury’s (idiots apostrophe?) chocolate when they owned that, and it has never returned to normal. I’m told it has something to do with the way milk is collected and transported over a distance in the States?

    I can’t claim to be a purist, having knowingly adopted words like Babe over the years but I must admit that there have been times I’d like to shake whoever decided Phonetic spelling was the way to go. Hugs Ellen.

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  2. I think I agree that using an apostrophe in German is adding a complication but as the use of inflected words instead of prepositions is difficult for foreigners, I’m inclined to favour non-inflected languages anyway. Oh, the trials of Latin at school. Is ‘who/whom the only survivor of inflection in English?

    As for ‘invaders’ , the use of ‘Can I get a (insert item of choice),’ in cafés etc, instead of ‘I’d like a (something),please’, is very annoying to me. If I were serving, I’d be tempted to say, ‘No, I’m paid to get it for you.’

    Maybe I’m mistaken but I seem to remember hearing that ‘gotten’ used to be correct on this side of the Atlantic but fell out of use, so that now it sounds strange when we hear it as a survivor.

    However, I’m practically an antique nowadays and the language moves on and changes regardless. The language of my youth wasn’t the same as my parents’ and only dead languages stay preserved in amber.

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    • Very true–languages change as long as they continue to be in use, and we stop noticing what was once annoying or charming or incomprehensible.

      I’m not sure about who/whom being the only inflected set of words left in English. Could be. My mind collects oddities of the language but it’s anything but systematic about it.

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    • Well…he/him, she/her, we/us, I/me seem to be doing well. The inflections that indicate word functions are disappearing in the US though. Yesterday I saw “change booth” instead of “changing booth.” “Change booth” sounds like the next advance of retailers’ greed…”If you’re so mean as to want change, wait in the booth.”

      Priscilla King

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      • Gee. I’d have gone to the change booth if I had a fiver and was hoping for quarters. I guess we can expect some confusion when they introduce a new word–along with the usual complaining about how wrong it is.

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  3. I have this discussion with my British friends here in Portugal. The one word that they think Americans are crazy wrong in calling zed zero! I also dated a Bristol native for a year, long ago in my past, and she pointed out the many language differences between Bristol farmers and Londonites. Here is a question. What do they call a quarter pounder with cheese in England? (Pulp Fiction reference)!

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    • As a vegetarian, I was about to disqualify myself but realized the menu would be online. The answer is, it’s still a quarter pounder. So–another invasive phrase. About zed, though: it’s what Americans call the letter zee. I’m not sure where zero comes into it.

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          • I think Peter means a fiftieth of a stone, which is 0.28 lbs, so a generous quarter-pounder.

            We don’t appear to be able to blame the Americans for “haitch,” but when I find the culprit….! Even BBC newsreaders will interrupt the nice (correct) “en-aitch-ess” to aspirate the freaking “H”. Then there are the waiting lists (or “wait lists”, if they must spoil that too).

            In the last few years I’ve got used to customers with English accents (and even a colleague who lives locally) asking where the bathroom or wash-room is. It’s amazing how many times we’ve renamed the place. Water closet, toilet, lavatory, wash-room, bathroom; you’d think we’d all be very clean, but busting by now.

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  5. Picture me sitting on my couch right now, corrupting the language.

    I picture you sitting on your sofa corrupting the language, actually, although that was an import from the Arabic, suffah, and my parents would have said, settee, a corruption of settle…also related to saddle. Etymonline.com is such a great resource.

    To be clear: I’m not saying I’m not saying the British are a nation of disapproving pedants.

    I would never not say that either.

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  7. Americans are using the term Spot On more frequently these days. I thnk our American education system should return to spelling words correctly such as Flavour, not flavor as one example. We don’t speak or write English properly.

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  8. As an English major/English teacher, what we need is someones’s ability to write so you know what they mean. Dealing with (most of my teaching career) sixth graders, I was big on that. Oh I corrected papers – you could get back a creative writing assignment that looked like it bled to death because every misspelling and punctuation mark was corrected, but if it was CREATIVE writing, you could still get an A.

    “Fresh Egg’s Drive In ” is one of my all–time favorites.

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    • Fresh Egg’s Drive In? For a very short set of words, that offers me so many places to stub my toe. A masterpiece.

      I’m with you on comprehensibility. The rest can be learned or corrected. What struck me, in much of my editing career, is how many people can’t follow a thought from one end to the other.

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  9. When I first got here Mrs Widds ans I would bamboozle each other with which word meant what … I with my British/Australian-isms, and she with her Canadian/American-isms. Thankfully over the years, (we celebrated out 20th wedding anniversary in September!) we’ve evolved our own intercontinental language. :D

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    • …as couples do, even when they grew up on the same block. Ours has absorbed various things the kids in our lives used to say. The kids have long since abandoned, and probably forgotten, them but we haven’t.

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  10. Do you mean to say that American(s) is/are corrupting the world? (Generalisation alert.) (WP spell check tells me generalisation should go with a zee. Not a zed.)

    Good to see your sense of humour (with a U) is alive and kicking.

    You take care now. (In the American sense)

    🙏🏻

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  11. As a disapproving pedant, I appreciate your blog. That said, in studying German on Duolingo, I frequently have to tell them that my answer should not be accepted because the answer they offered is incorrect English.

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    • I love it. I don’t suppose Duolingo listens, though.

      As a semi-disapproving pendant, I’m on both sides of the language purity debate–not so much as it applies to foreign borrowings but to rules of grammar and syntax. I worked as an editor and copyeditor (which can be spelled as either one or two words and no matter which one I use I imagine someone criticizing my choice). I appreciate the rules that make published work easy to read and consistent, although since I retired I’ve given myself over to glorious inconsistency. Screw it: it’s just a blog and no one’s paying me to fret over it. So that is (or started out as) one hand. On the other, I know that it’s the changes people make (and rule-enforcers disapprove of) that drive change. What starts out as incorrect becomes standard. Not all of it, but some. I admire the life and drive in ordinary usage. I don’t even try to reconcile the two arguments.

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  15. Where’s my six shooter ?
    Wehret den Anfängen ! (If it was good enough for Ovid, it’s good enough for me.)

    It may be confusing for some to learn that the German language is not “adopting” the fucking apostrophe right now …

    It is basically very simple. If one wants to say that Paul owns an “Imbiss”, it is simply “Pauls Imbiss”. No apostrophe. This is the correct version.

    (A rabbit hole : An Imbiss is NO restaurant. It is a greasy spoon where you gulp down your Currywurst with a can of cheap beer. McDoof is no restaurant too, it will never be, it is just a greasy spoon on a worldwide level. It had to be said.)

    The apostroph is used in German to show that something is missing, a letter, a syllable, or a part of a syllable. Es ist ein Auslassungszeichen.
    Wo gehst’n hin ? Auf’n Berg. [Where do you go ? Up the mountain.]
    Correct : Wohin gehst Du ? Auf den Berg.
    This should be self explanatory.

    In come the idiots, who started the apostrophy by using the damn little sign in an English way, and made “Pauls” genitivus possesoris into “Paul’s” – there is nothing missing, not one letter, it is just idiotic. It became a Mode, a fashion. One may call it “living language”, I call it ugly bullshit, quietly weeping into my Kraut mit Bratwürscht. After the forth can of cheap lager I may mumble something about “Amerikanischen Kulturimperialismus” and “Verblödung der Jugend” …

    A word about Duden. It is a publishing house that sells “Wörterbücher”. They claim to show the correct use of German words, orthography included. Of course I use their Lexika too. And anybody who needs to translate into German can (and should) do so too.
    But they do not make the rules, they have absolutely no authority to decide what is “correct” and what is “wrong”. Maybe they are comparable to Merriam-Webster, but I do not know for sure.
    When Duden says that “Andy’s Imbiss” would be correct my first reaction is “Shame on you, basteds !”, then “Pfärrdeschwanz !” (as an Hungarian friend used to put it), and finally I’d look at the official authority and their recommendations. Yes, I may be very disapppointed then. But frankly, I can’t be arsed to do this, sorry.

    “Correct” German “exists” for one reason, and for one reason only. Normative texts must be “eindeutig”, unambiguously clear. Not nice, not aesthetically satisfying, they must be clear. What I write in my private correspondence is my decision, and mine only. But there is a set of rules, and kids need to learn them, because citizens need to understand it when they are confronted with an “official” text. And those, who have to write “official” texts, need to have a clear set of rules to express what is meant. Clearly. This includes the apostrophe too.

    Do not start me on “Rechtschreibreform”.

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    • I was hoping you’d weigh in knowledgeably on this. Thanks.

      Since English uses the apostrophe both for missing bits and for the possessive, we create all sorts of confusion for our befuddled selves, and if you’re so inclined you could do a misplaced apostrophe tour of just about any English-speaking land. Since I moved to Britain, I’ve been introduced to the phrase “grocer’s apostrophe.” That’s the one you find on a sign saying “orange’s.” Having worked as an editor and copyeditor, I’m on both sides of the changing-language debate. I learned the rules and tried to sweep everyone I dealt with inside the circle of the rules. I enjoyed it and I think it made their writing better. The more I learned, of course, the more I realized I didn’t know, but that’s another story. On the other hand, I also believe strongly that language changes, that the mistakes of one generation become the rules of a later one. I believe that the energy of a language comes from those changes and that a language can’t be kept within any set of bounds.

      Where does that leave me? Arguing both sides, of course. And still knowing next to no German.

      Thanks for your comments. I do enjoy them.

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      • “… I think it made their writing better.”

        Forgot who said that any correction that is worth to be made, enhances the quality of a text. I am sure that goes for any “public” text, official, or journalistic writing / functional writing (“Funktionstexte”).
        I believe it is different for novels and other forms of literature (“schöne Literatur” it was called). Grass, Fontane, Heine, Goethe wrote their texts the way they are, and no one has to “enhance” them just because some lousy ink pissers create new rules a la mode.
        I do not accept the argument that it would be too different for a contemporary reader to understand a 19th century text (or older), so the “need” for “modernisation” is the result of the reader’s lazyness. If the reader wants distraction – there are tons of easily consumable Kitschereien around. If the reader wants to read classic German texts, he, she or it for fuck’s sake has to use their brainz’.
        (If one “corrects” literature according to “new” rules, the “Gehalt” of these texts is changed, subtly but nevertheless undaubtly changed ; this is assumption.)

        Of course the language changes, is alive. One can observe this in the way descendants of immigrants conquer, adapt, and redefine for themselves German, what results in music (“Sprechgesang”, rap), poetry, and general art discharging (some of that rap makes me think of Goethe in Heidelberg). They create a sociolect, and happily commit crimes against grammar, but I doubt that a relatively small subgenre will have a lasting impact on da rulz, yo.

        I worked as Korrektor, I was not too good, especially Kommata were / are my weakness.
        Writers, even old battle horses, can be a bit delicate when confronted with corrections, smashingly squeamish …

        Thank you for the positive feedback. Of course my coments are a direct result of your enjoyable posts … yeah, thanks for triggering me … :)

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        • Editing’s a strange thing. A good one is a joy to work with, however annoying it is to have someone march in and change what you’ve worked so hard on. I’ve been lucky–for the most part–in my editors. They’ve made my books better. The thing is, an outsider can see what I can’t and can push me further than I can push myself. I value that. Some writers hate it. I expect the relationship’s a bit like the actor/director relationship. It can be wonderful. It can be hellish.

          I’m with you on m odernizing old texts. Mostly. I would’n’t have read Chaucer if a modernized edition hadn’t been available. The language has changed too much for the casual reader–or for a high school kid, which is what I was at the time.

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  17. “Annoying business-speak words and phrases like going forward and touch base showed–mercifully–no clear growth.” Love that, Ellen. And until I read one of your comments here I was not aware of the term “grocer’s apostrophe”—that is one I shall be using (insert ‘going forward’, if you like).

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