Germans are heavily borrowing English words, and this has some German linguistics experts worried.

Germany has borrowed or adopted 10,000 English words into their own language since 1990. At least that's what NPR authoritatively says, as they apparently stood listening at the Berlin Wall as it fell and haven't stopped counting since.

Holger Klatte, the spokesman for the German Language Society, explains his concern to NPR.

"Languages do tend to affect one another, but the influence of English in Germany is so strong that Germans are having a hard time advancing their own vocabulary," he says.

Klatte says that can be a problem for Germans who may not know any English.

"The second world war and Nazi times have led Germans to downplay the importance of their language," he says. "Unlike the French, Finns and Poles — they promote their languages a lot more than we do."


If I'm Finnish, I'm suing whoever's promoting my language and demanding a refund. Even the Muppets chose the Swedish Chef over anything Finnish.

Anatol Stefanowitsch, an English linguistics professor at the Free University of Berlin, tells NPR that Germans are just overemphasizing the matter. As Stefanowitsch notes, roughly 25% of the German language comes from borrowed words. English, by comparison, borrows 40-80% of its words from other languages--and it's a healthy, robust language doing just fine.

"No language has ever disappeared because it borrowed words," Stefanowitsch says.

Quite true. It might become a hot mess like English, but it never disappeared.