A case study of foreign and especially English influence on the language of shop signs and shop windows in three European cities.
PEOPLE have always worried about language purity: ‘No greater harm can be done to a
nation than taking away its national character and the idiosyncrasies of its language’
(Immanuel Kant, over 200 years ago). ‘Kein Denglisch in deutschen Wörterbüchern’
is a citation of the German Verein zur Wahrung der deutschen Sprache e.V. (‘Association for
the Protection of the German Language’)1, founded in 1997. Theirs is a struggle to keep German
free of too much foreign-language influence: most notably English.