Glushak on The Status of Loanwords in German @mgimo_en

Vasiliy Glushak, Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO), has published The Status of Loanwords in German. Here is the abstract.

The emergence of borrowed lexical units in legal texts is due to various factors. Borrowings are often synonyms for terms already used in legal discourse, or they denote a new phenomenon to which a German-language term is eventually chosen, which again leads to the existence of synonymous denotations. This phenomenon is also connected with the history of law. Borrowed elements were often components of paired expressions. Here are just a few examples that included borrowings: Erbschaft oder Succession - confirmieren und bestätigen - Contract oder Bündnis - contravenieren und zuwiderhandeln - Genehmigung und Approbation. The borrowed component was highlighted in writing and in print with a special font. The listing along with the borrowed component of an authentic, German word that reveals the meaning of the borrowing can be seen as a continuation of the tradition already described: fair und angemessen, fair und ausgewogen, fair und unparteiisch. Fair action is thus to be understood as action based on a reasonable, considered and impartial approach. A peculiarity of the German legal language is an active tendency to reject foreign-language terms imposed on it. This can be established by analysing the frequency of use of borrowed synonymous lexemes. The markers of the group of borrowed words are suffixes -tion, -tät, -ier. This table contains information about the use of these suffixes in the German legal texts: GG (Basic Law), BGB (Civil Code), the EU foundation documents (Treaty on European Union (VEU) and Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (LISSABON), two important regulations (ROM I and ROM II) and one current regulation (VO2022/126) for comparison. The number of words with determinative borrowed vocabulary components -tät, -tion, -ieren in the EU documents is not comparable to the similar vocabulary in the German legal documents. On 412 pages of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union and 283 pages of the Treaty of Lisbon there are 503 and 278 words with -tät and over 1,000 words with -tion in both documents. Whereas in the 50 pages of the Basic Law and 422 pages of the GGU there are 44 and 122 words with -tion and 9 and 13 with -tät respectively. Verbs with -ieren are only 25 in the Fundamental Law and 64 in the GGU, while the EU texts mentioned above have between 200 and 300 examples of this. The use of loan words is probably intended to accelerate the unification of European law and to turn the language of legal documents into a kind of lingua franca that is generally understood by everyone working with the document, regardless of their nationality. EU law has a strong influence on the terminological system of German national law. Synonymous designations alternate in the texts of the law in similar contexts: in das Fahrzeug eingebaut, in ein Gerät eingebaut zu werden, im Anzeigegerät integriert, zusammengebaut, ineinander gebaut oder kombiniert. The frequency advantage of German-speaking terms allows us to conclude that the German language is resistant to borrowing. However, the trend towards a quantitative increase in the use of borrowed terms, often unwarranted when a native equivalent is available, makes the future of the terminological system of German language look with concern in view of the trend towards a globalised language of law.

Download the paper from SSRN at the link.