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.
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Maria Schlick (2002) studied this question.