AP, December 11, 2008
{snip}
… [M]embers of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s ruling Christian Democratic party agreed at a recent party conference to seek to “anchor” the German language in the nation’s constitution.
The proposal envisions a six-word phrase being added to the 22nd article, which stipulates Berlin as the capital city and the German flag as horizontally striped black, red and gold: “The language of the Federal Republic of Germany is German.”
It’s no big surprise some Germans feel a need to prop up their language.
With its four cases, three genders, maze of clauses and propensity for hanging verbs at the end of unusually long sentences, even Germans poke fun at their native tongue.
{snip}
Yet despite the World War II stigma, some of the strongest support for the German language proposal came from Germany’s Central Council of Jews.
“The German language is part of the national identity,” the council’s general secretary Stefan Kramar said. “It is not exclusive, but is part of the identification with our country.”
The Christian Democrats’ resolution—which Merkel herself opposes—comes as Germany debates ways to better integrate its millions of immigrants, many of them Turks who moved to Germany as guest workers in the ‘60s and still struggle to speak German.
Merkel’s government has stressed the importance of assimilating its more than 10 million foreign nationals and immigrants, including measures ensuring that immigrant children learn German in preschool.
“Language is our cultural identity and the basis of our mental existence,” Christian Democratic legislator Anette Huebinger said in defense of the resolution.
“Consequently learning and mastering of a national language is the key to successful and sustainable integration.”
{snip}
Party conference resolutions are not binding and—in addition to Merkel—the CDU’s junior coalition partners, the Social Democrats, as well as leading members of the opposition, have expressed opposition to the proposal.
Experts on constitutional law say such a constitutional amendment would have no immediate legal implications.
{snip}
Seventeen EU states guarantee their native tongues in their constitutions including neighboring France and German-speaking Austria. German is also a national language in Switzerland, Liechtenstein and Luxembourg.
Since 2006, Germany has lobbied hard to have the language elevated to “official” status in the European Union, alongside English and French.
{snip}
Original article
(Posted on December 16, 2008)
Comments
If the Germans are worried about the EU as a threat to the German language, then they ought to look in the mirror, because the EU is essentially Greater Germany, in terms of monetary, financial and economic influence.
Also, I could imagine that there might be a quarrel to see which German is the official German. There are plenty to choose from.
Every nation has its language under threat by immigrants. When is the white established world going to stand up and stop this madness into their own back yards? These people from third world nations need to stay home and run their own countries instead of ruining ours!
It may seem a good idea, having English as a kind of global language. This is not a trend with long term benefits though. In the long term it a trend which benefits only the black race.
Learn English. Too many Germans do not. France is hardly even part of the first world anymore for the double whammy of an increasingly isolated language and massive immigration.
Germany, since WWII, is still under military occupation, and the ‘constitution’ that they pretend to live under is illegal. Like other EU countries, they do not have control of their borders, their economy, or their currency.
It’s a sad consolation prize to the German people to actually allow them to keep German as their official language, after they’ve been robbed of everything else. The fact that there was even a debate about this issue shows how much humiliation that Germany has been subjected to for the last sixty years.
Let the Turks keep their language. It encourages separation.
“Every nation has its language under threat by immigrants. When is the white established world going to stand up and stop this madness into their own back yards?”
When Whites are ready to die for their own heritage in the same way that they die for everyone elses.
It is disgusting that the Germans can’t distinguish dark haired people. In fact, at least 50% of the “Turkish” population in Germany aren’t ethnically Turkish. It includes Kurds, Armenians, Arabs, Assyrians, etc… who hold Turkish passport or emigrated from Turkey to Germany.
“No matter how great a wrong is done to the Germans, some obscure German professor will always turn up and rearrange and reconfigure objectivity until he has proven that the Germans themselves did wrong.”
—Baroness Germaine de Stael, French-Swiss writer, (1766-1817)
“It’s a sad consolation prize to the German people to actually allow them to keep German as their official language, after they’ve been robbed of everything else. “
Posted by at 10:37 PM on December 16
If they were robbed, it was Hitler who robbed them and did the highest amount of physical and emotional damage to the German people.
“…Germany debates ways to better integrate its millions of immigrants, many of them Turks who moved to Germany as guest workers in the ‘60s and still struggle to speak German.”
My guess would be, a little of both: Muslim lack of assimilation is part laziness (born of contempt/disrespect for their Infidel hosts); and part their naturally low intelligence (as demonstrated repeatedly by their invariably dismal IQ scores).
A German-speaking Turk is no more a German than a Turkish-speaking Turk. Why is the only solution ‘integration’ and ‘assimilation’? There are trains and planes that travel east just as well as they travel west. Some with the U.S. As far as immigrants are considered, we only have an ‘In’ door. Time for some of them to use the ‘Out’ door.
One of the most pitiable spectacles I Have seen came in a German report and film which showed a fair little German girl, the sole German in a class of coloureds including blacks in a school in Hamburg, where much was made of how clever the immigrant children were to be learning a new language. Such is the perverseness of the multicultural marxists who run Europe, that that little girl in her own country was made to feel inadequate, as she said regretfully ’ I only speak German’.
‘Whiteplight’ wrote:
“If they were robbed, it was Hitler who robbed them and did the highest amount of physical and emotional damage to the German people.”
Congratulations on reciting the History Channel’s version of WWII. History is much more complicated than how you’ve summed up the war and the German people in one sentence. Our former Secretary of State, James Baker had this to say in an interview with a major German news magazine:
“We painted Hitler as a monster, a devil. And that’s why we could not move away from that portrayal after the war. We had mobilized the masses against the devil incarnate. And so we were forced to continue in this satanic scenario after the war. We could not possibly have explained to our people that the war had actually been only a preventative economic measure.”
—James Baker III (1930- ), Secretary of State of the United States of America, (Quoted in the German news magazine ‘Der Spiegel,’ issue 13/1992
A few things:
I wish the Germans luck in making German the official language of Germany. Actually, I would like to see some other languages of Germany made official too, like East and North Frisian, Kölsch, Upper Saxon, Upper and Lower Sorbian and Swabian. Of those, surely the Sorbian and Frisian languages deserve status.
German is in no danger of going extinct. No White European languages of states are. The very idea is preposterous.
The IQ’s of Turks in Germany are around 90. That’s certainly high enough to learn to a foreign language. You really don’t need much of an IQ to learn a language. 70 IQ Africans learn all sorts of foreign languages in adulthood.
A German-speaking Turk is no more a German than a Turkish-speaking Turk. Why is the only solution ‘integration’ and ‘assimilation’?
Good question. And a German-speaking Turk is no more a “German” than a French-speaking Congolese is a Frenchman. (Or an English-speaking Nigerian is an Englishman.) Language is just one part of the package comprising nationality, but genes are the heart of it.
The dissolving of the European ethnostates greatly bothers me. As someone already pointed out, just because a person learns a language doesn’t make that person German, French, Italian, or whatever. Multiculturalism is the handmaiden of globalism, which needs people to be interchangable.
Those of us who despise and oppose multiculturalism are, in fact, true lovers of difference and dichotomy. Multiculturalism is the enemy of real difference, and has only been a tool mainly designed for battering away at the psyches of White Westerners.
The rest of the world is tribal. We need to get with the programme too. Unfortunately, many of our worst enemies are our ‘own’ people who promulgate all of these social engineering schemes — and embolden the non-Whites to new levels of beligerance.
When the “new world order” becomes too top-heavy and over extended, it will fall as hard and disasterously as the giant that it is. After that awful time, we will go back to our ‘tribal’ ethno-states, although I am sure their shapes and contures will be much different.
Halliche Grischtdaag un beede zum Gott fa unser Leid!
The Germans need not worry, as they will probably be put on reservations in what used to be their country. Tourists will take pictures of them, some traditional crafts will be preserved, and their more attractive women will remain in demand among their new Muslim masters.
“German is in no danger of going extinct. No White European languages of states are. The very idea is preposterous.”
Why is it “preposterous”? Why do you offer such statements, totally unsupported by any explanation or argument? I do not find it preposterous at all.
