Alexander Solzhenitsyn's project entitled "Russian Dictionary of Language Expansion" has taken its place in many people's memory - a compendium of "good" words recommended by the writer for use in place of the "monstrosities" that had taken root. As Deutsche Welle notes, attempts of this kind - a call not to grab at anything, but to turn to the archive for the right word - are also made by speakers of other languages. Thus, under the motto "For Living German" (Lebendiges Deutsch), a group of enthusiastic educators urge their compatriots to be more demanding of the Anglicisms that find their way into the media and advertising. It is they who, in the opinion of the chairman of the Society for the German Language, Walter Krämer, and the head of the German Teachers' Association, Josef Kraus, impose stereotypes of speech behavior on unstable native speakers.
What worries us is not borrowings from English as such, but precisely mindless Anglomania, say philologists. In doing so, they cite the results of surveys conducted after viewing advertisements on German television broadcast in English: only between 8 and 59% of viewers understand what is said. Under the influence of the fighters "for living German," the TV company Sat.1 refused in its commercial to use the English text "Powered by emotions" (approximate translation: "Charged with the energy of feelings"), replacing it with "Sat.1 zeigt's allen" (approximate translation: "Sat.1 will give pleasure to everyone"). Whether the organizers of the action are satisfied with this option is not yet known.
In February, the success of the campaign for living German could be judged by who would win in the .de domain in a "race" between the English "home page" (Homepage) and the German "start page" (Startseite). True, the organizers of the campaign admitted that the word "start" is also of English origin. But it is so capacious, so short, so... one's own.
The language has been "cleansed" of foreign elements before, for example, in the 14th century from the dominance of Latin words, and in the era of the Thirty Years' War and later - during the First World War - from French influence too "tender" for the Teutonic spirit. Apart from the short-term effect, native speakers did not yield to directives, and today in German, as in Russian, there are both "orfografiya" and "pravopisaniye", both "dnevnik" and "zhurnal".
For the sake of fairness, it should be said that there are other philologists and educators - those for whom it is more important to collect what native speakers have spontaneously selected and understand how and why one word has become established while another, perhaps considered by the majority to be much more beautiful, still cannot find its "user". No matter how hard esthetes tried, Russian speakers, for example, never accepted the beautiful native forms of address "sudarynya" or "sudar". And Germans, for example, still cannot find an equivalent for the English "countdown".
Fortunately, the language knows no countdown.