Cultural Values Reflected in German Sports Terminology

German sports terminology is examined as a repository of culturally specific value orientations. The study addresses a gap in the linguistics of sport: while Anglicisms, metaphor and media discourse in German sports language have been described in detail, the value content encoded in the terminological system itself has rarely been quantified. A corpus of 123 lexical items was compiled from two programmatic primary sources of German sports nomenclature — the chapter „Über die Turnsprache“ in Jahn and Eiselen’s Die Deutsche Turnkunst (1816) and Konrad Koch’s Germanising glossary of football terms (1903) — and classified along six value dimensions by means of componential and linguocultural analysis. Order, rule and adjudication accounts for the largest share of the corpus (28.5%), followed by spatial and temporal regulation (22.8%), community and cooperative play (15.4%), combat and defence (13.8%), effort and bodily performance (12.2%) and decency and fair play (7.3%). The two sources are shown to be complementary rather than identical: the Turnsprache foregrounds communal and spatial discipline, whereas Koch’s football glossary foregrounds regulation, adjudication and agonal roles. The findings support the view that terminological purism in German sport was an instrument of value transmission, not merely of lexical hygiene, and that the resulting nomenclature still constrains present-day patterns of borrowing.