ABSTRACT
In the course of the twentieth century English became an international lingua franca with a truly world-wide base like no other language before it: there are more learners of English in China than native speakers in the rest of the world. It began to have a significant influence on German in the nineteenth century when it led the world in the industrial revolution, was admired as a model of established democracy and by the turn of the century replaced French as the language of cachet among the chattering classes of the capital Berlin. Some of the contemporary-looking loans of the present day – Selfmademan, Bestseller, Song – actually originate from this era. After the First World War and, to a much greater extent, the Second World War, English was swept to the status of world langauge by the rise of the USA to super-power status in the age of politico-economic, technological and cultural globalization. English (or more accurately Anglo-american) influence has come to dominate specific domains of the German language: the advertising, fashion, popular music, and entertainment industries (as well as the media outlets devoted to these), economics, finance and the corporate world, computing and the web, youth culture, tourism and aviation. In fact, in 2000, the German courts defended the rights of Lufthansa Technik AG to give official warnings to an engineer who insisted on turning English terms commonly used in the aviation industry into German (e.g. E door, wing > G Tür, Tragfläche).
