Nähe und Distanz. Die Linguistik und der Anglizismendiskurs

"How shall we deal with anglicisms?" This has become one of the most pressing questions in Germany’s folk-linguistic discourse over the past decade. Linguists have tried to participate in the discussion, but the result has been rather disappointing. In points of principle, the non-linguist discourse participants tend to disagree on linguistic arguments and favour their own language beliefs. This article analyses the situation, sketching the reasons for the inter-discoursive problems between linguists and laymen, and bringing to bear al large corpus of lay and linguistic documents. Most importantly, it shows that the public discourse on anglicisms focusses only partially on linguistic problems in the narrow sense but rather on social problems, while the linguists' arguments fail to deal with these. It is shown that there are valid (discourse-specific) reasons for both points of view.