Expatica's resident German teacher Renate Grasstat looks at the German terms voted words (and 'un-words') of the year and asks what they reveal about German society.

Since 1972, the Gesellschaft für deutsche Sprache has been publishing the "Word of the Year" - a word that has widely influenced discussion in the country and is usually a new creation.

The word of the year 2005 was "Bundeskanzlerin". Far from being a new word, the feminine ending "-in" for a job that had always been performed by a male person so far seemed to be worth mentioning as a revolutionary innovation.


Separating the men from the women

That's Krankenpfleger to you, mate.

der Bäcker - die Bäckerin
der Lehrer - die Lehrerin
der Arzt - die Ärztin
der Direktor - die Direktorin

Exceptions like "die Krankenschwester" (nurse) or "die Hebamme" (midwife) can be traced back to situations where no distinction between masculine and feminine was necessary -because this used to be a profession only performed by women. (Nowadays we have "der Krankenpfleger" for the emancipated man, but as far as I know no equivalent for masculine "midwives".)

Some words have a completely different ending ("der Angestellte / die Angestellte"); other exceptions with only masculine forms had been for instance "der Seemann" (sailor) - and: "der Bundeskanzler" - traditionally male.

All's well that ends well

You might think this was a very meticulous and fussy way of using the language - and compared to English I have to say: yes, that's exactly how it is.

In the 1970s women groups emphasized the importance of their female endings in official speeches and written materials, so that bureaucrats, politicians and journalists now have to say: Liebe Leserinnen und Leser, sehr geehrte Bürgerinnen und Bürger, liebe Zuhörerinnen und Zuhörer.

Already emancipated

Interestingly enough, the former GDR did not use these forms very often, and I witnessed more than one discussion shortly after the Wall came down about the necessity of feminine endings. Women from the former GDR often claimed that they did not need emancipation through "words" because they already had it in reality.

 On the other hand it sounded really strange (to "Western" ears) when a woman said: "Ich bin Arzt." - somehow as if a cat had said: "I am a dog." (Just an example of how important language can be.)

Nowadays the "-in" endings seem to have been asserted - even for Angela Merkel, although I admit I will never understand why this was an event important enough to be the "word of the year".

Reflecting changes

However, history shows that the words of the year do reflect the changes in the values of society. For example, "Reisefreiheit" was the word for 1989, the year when the Wall came down. The choices in the following years showed how the German political situation developed afterwards:

1990: neue Bundesländer: "new federal states" i.e. the former GDR
1991: Besserwessi: somebody from the West part of Germany who constantly tries to criticise what people from the East are doing - a combination of "Besserwisser" (fault

And the winner of the 2005 Word of the Year is