German Language Experts bemoan the rise of Denglish
Despite the reputation of Germany being able to understand English, only about 10 percent of the population speak and understand English really well. Most of them don't understand the English one-liner slogans that advertising is fond of.
In this article, they also say that Mitsubishi's slogan "Driving Alive" is often mistranslated as "survive the drive in our car".
Their movement calls to try and preserve German from being free of English catchphrases and vocabulary, and sticking to the German translation of the words.
I feel it is impossible to stop the external encroachment of words, or phrases or ideas of other countries from filtering in and changing the native language. We can see in other languages today the absorption of foreign words into native tongue. Japanese, for instance, uses a secondary set of characters to denote foreign origin: Car is kuruma. Chinese uses a phonetic partiality of the foreign word: English (the language) becomes Yingyu (Ying is the phonetic, yu meaning speech). These languages manage to keep their identity by making it known which words are foreign.
A language dies out every couple of weeks, mainly because a regional language has been replaced by a global language. As children grow up, they find little utility or practice using their regional languages, and within a few generations it is gone forever as the elders pass away.
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