Out of the mouths of babes...

Dear Reader,

A couple of months ago, my toddler figured out that his parents speak to him in two different languages. Since then, he’s constantly been asking what things like Auto or Bagger are in ‘Papa English’.

He can now sort all of his books out into ones in English and German. What he hasn’t quite grasped yet is that English has its own rules of grammar. In his head, he just needs to plug the important English words into a German sentence and—bingo.

His new contributions to the German language include ‘Ich habe es ge-broken’ and ‘und dann macht es crash!’

Fortunately for his English, he’ll grow out of this soon enough… but what’s good for his English might not be so good for his German.

The latest edition of the Duden, Germany’s standard dictionary, was released this week and it has swollen by 3,000 new entries - thanks mainly to the inexorable rise of Denglish.

Published every four years, the Duden sees itself as a record of how German is used in the year that it is published rather t…