How Germans are forgetting their own language

Photo by Dana Ward on Unsplash

Dear Reader,

If you’ve been in conversation with a German colleague recently, and you’ve been making the effort to speak their language, you may have asked yourself why they kept gulping in the middle of words.

Let me put your mind at rest: all that gulping and gagging wasn’t the result of an undiagnosed and potentially fatal illness.

In fact, it was their way of telling you that the people you were talking about weren’t just men. They were politely letting you know you were discussing women and people of no chosen gender, too.

Confused? Let me explain.

Much like in English, you can put an -er on the root of ‘doing’ verbs in German to turn them into a noun. Just as we make speaker out of speak, doer from do, and thinker from think, Germans make Sprecher out of sprech, Macher out of mach and Denker out of Denk.

For many centuries this was the generic form of the noun - i.e. it didn’t give us any further information about the participant. At the same time, the wo…