Lehnwortgut oder (Neo)Sprachpurismus: Eine falsche Alternative anstelle komplementärer Dialektik

Loan words generally have a bad reputation – but it is hard to imagine the language without them anyway. The reason for this ambivalence seems not least to be the fact that foreign borrowings, mostly in statu nascendi, may cause hostility because of the disruption of the usual resting position, while their numerically serious catalytic role in the establishment of target language equivalents – usually with the disappearance of the borrowings connected – mostly goes unnoticed. This discrepancy is summed up as the dialectic of conflict, and according to Spitzmüller (2005) as the “incompatibility of two divergent discourses”: “[It] shows that language in public is more than a medium of communication: it functions as a collective ›social symbol‹ and as a means of constituting identity and alterity. Metalinguistic discourse is therefore never exclusively related to language. Social fears, social conflicts and therefore a given socio-historical situation always stand behind it.”