I'm a simple emigrant as well as a new type of German

Recently, on one beautiful morning I turned on my playlist and I said, “now I will open the lyrics of the song and try to sing along right away to develop my German.” And I started “Was los, Digga, ahnma.” And I immediately heard “uhhh, please, pick another song to learn German.” This particular one is more of a ghettodeutsch example, but in style it’s already very close to Kiezdeutsch or Kiezdeutsch. Remember I mentioned generations of immigrant children who change the language? Well, this is it. In the 1960s Germany signed agreements to attract guest workers. First from Italy and Spain, then from Yugoslavia, Greece, and then mass from Turkey. They invited them temporarily — help was needed during the period of the economic miracle. But you know how it goes with temporary. People stayed, started families or brought theirs over, the community grew, and today the Turkish diaspora is the largest diaspora in Germany. Generations grew up, went to school, started communicating with each other and began forming their own variant of German. Grammar simplified, words shortened, Turkish and Arabic expressions seeped into speech. As a result, Kiezdeutsch – German with a mix of Turkish, Arabic, Balkan and a lot of slang. Here are a couple of examples of Kiezdeutsch: — Isch geh’ Bahnhof instead of “Ich gehe zum Bahnhof” – shortened for speed. I don’t even know where they spend all the saved time. — Lan – from Turkish “bro”. — Wallah – an Arabic oath, now a synonym for “honestly/really.” Kiezdeutsch is especially heard in Berlin, Frankfurt and Cologne. And it’s understandable; according to the latest data, for example in our state more than 40% of school pupils are children with a migration history. Of course, many people don’t like such a trend at all. Teachers complain that standard German is disappearing, the older generation, as is proper, protests that the children have turned the language into gibberish, but linguists say that this is quite normal and that migrants in fact bring liveliness to literary German. At Humboldt University in Berlin, for example, Kiezdeutsch is being studied seriously. And attitudes toward dialect are also often driven by attitudes toward the social group that speaks it. Personally I think the spread of Kiezdeutsch is neither good nor bad; it’s simply a natural process. And what do you think? #history #language photo: GfdS