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German ministry cracks down on Anglicisms
Dec 29, 2010, 16:44 GMT
Berlin - Germany's Transport Ministry has launched a crackdown on English words, urging staff to stop using common German terms such as 'laptop,' a spokeswoman confirmed in Berlin Wednesday.
Instead, ministerial officials have been told to use the less well known term 'Klapprechner' for a notebook computer.
Spokeswoman Sabine Mehwald confirmed that minister Peter Ramsauer, a conservative from the state of Bavaria, had appealed to staff to preserve the German language, mainly protecting it from words of English origin. 'There's no compulsion about it,' she said.
'It's quite important to the minister how each of us treats the mother tongue,' she added. The ministry has a list of banned terms.
Others on the list include 'ticket' and 'flip chart,' with staff urged to call them a 'Fahrschein' and a 'Tafelschreibblock.'
But a motorists' organization, Auto Club Europa (ACE), called on the minister to instead focus on traffic law and reframe it in German instead of in 'bureaucratese.' ACE said parts of the road code used bureaucratic German that most Germans could not understand.
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