Anglicisms in the German "Cosmopolitan" and in the German news magazine "Der Spiegel". A quantitive survey of lexical borrowing in the German language (PDF)

Seminar paper from the year 2016 in the subject Didactics - English - Pedagogy, Literature Studies, grade: 1,0, University of Würzburg, language: English, abstract: The following paper is a research on the quantitative use of Anglicisms in two German magazines. The analysis will feature a selection of two issues of the German Cosmopolitan and Spiegel from December 2015. I chose these magazines because this type of material has not been considered in studies yet. There are many researches about the usage of Anglicisms in Spiegel over the years, or the integration of Anglicisms in advertisements found in magazines. As there is a gap of statistics including the comparison of the number of Anglicisms in a news magazine and a lifestyle magazine, I chose it to become the topic of this seminar paper. Further, this paper will analyze the usage of Anglicisms and their percentage distribution with regard to the different word classes.

First, I will give a comprehensive overview over Thomason (2001) and Winford's (2003, 2010) theories of language contact and borrowing. Following that, I will give some definitions concerning linguistic jargon and give samples of how Anglicisms are integrated into the German morphological and inflectional pattern. The main part of this paper will be the evaluation of the data I collected and the comparison of the quantitative impact of Anglicisms in Cosmopolitan and Spiegel. I conclude with a closer examination of the compounds found in the two magazines.