Anglicisms in German: tsunami or trickle?

The influence of English upon German is subject to an ongoing debate in the German popular media and on the internet. One recurring theme is the view that English is having a negative effect on German, particularly in relation to the volume of anglicisms in the language. This paper disputes this belief by exploring the lexical influence that English has on German. The study makes use of three corpora of spontaneous spoken modern German as well as drawing on previous research on conventional printed sources. It is argued that perceptions often alluded to in the popular media and on the internet regarding anglicisms, such as that they are "flooding" the language, "destroying" its grammatical system, replacing the native lexicon, and are incomprehensible, are unfounded. The study concludes that anglicisms are restricted in number and semantic fields, become integrated or nativized into German through hybridization and other processes, and are semantically innovative.