Apart from politicization of anglicism discourse, critical voices on the occurrence of English in German found an institutional organ with the foundation of the Association of the German language (Verein Deutsche Sprache) in 1997.
As described on its webpage, a major goal of this association is to 'protect the German language against being displaced by English'.
According to Spitzmuller (2005) and Pfalzgraf (2006) the founding members of the association are particularly prone to using purist imagery in decrying the use of English in German (see below for examples).
After a detailed analysis of purist traces of anglicism discourse on the Internet, in pamphlets, and in other publicly available written documents, Pfalzgraf (2006:64) establishes a set of characteristic arguments in purist criticism.
These are summarized in the following:
Anglicisms (as mixing of German and English) are generally considered as bad style.
The users of anglicisms are described as half-educated, as superficially and carelessly following a fashionable fad, and as using English as a means of showing off. Anglicisms are vague and they intentionally obscure meaning to deceive people (e.g., in advertisements).They generally create problems of understanding.
Sometimes the former state of German is referred to as a role model. This strategy frequently involves calling upon iconic historical personae in German literature and philosophy.
Finally, the occurrence of anglicisms in German can be put into a larger scheme of US political plans to Americanize the world (complot theory). Thus far, the article has sketched the evolving scholarly tradition of anglicism research, which tends to describe the phenomenon in neutral terms of language change.
At the same time, this section has focussed on the resurgence of purist tendencies towards the occurrence of anglicisms in German.
This raises the question: on which conceptual grounds are these divergent views of the same phenomenon based In order to answer this question, conceptual metaphor theory emerges as a proper tool for investigating how academic and public views frame their understanding of language in general and of anglicisms as peculiar foreign elements of a language.
On the linguistic side of the coin, conceptualizations are established from common theories of language contact as given in Clyne (2003), Coetsem (2000), Field (2002), Muysken (2000), Myers-Scotton (1993, 2002), Onysko (2007), and Thomason (2001). For reasons of space, the individual theories are not explicated in more detail here, but are taken at their common metaphorical core of conceptualizing language and contact.
To exemplify underlying conceptual structures of public discourse on anglicisms in German, recent articles on the topic were selected from the German newspaper Die Welt, between September 2007 and September 2008.
A search via Lexis Nexis in headlines and lead paragraphs has yielded 9 articles that explicitly deal with the issue of anglicisms.
Two of them are interviews with people involved in Verein Deutsche Sprache (YDS), Wolf Schneider, author of a popular book on supposedly proper usage of German, and Walter Kramer, president of the association.
The remaining seven articles and short squibs take a more neutral stance on the issue. The following two sections take a closer look at the conceptualizations of public discourse emerging from the newspaper articles and on how, by contrast, language and language contact is conceptualized among linguists.
Anglicisms As Peculiar Foreign Elements of A Language