Is the German language on the best way to die out?

It is time to recover a huge secret: For those who do not know me, I am a German girl and there is one fact I have to tell you about some Germans, but do not tell any German…pssst! ;-)


The Germans sometimes do not handle their own language.

Imagine you are walking along the streets and see some small children playing in a park. One little girl considers a blond haired doll lovely: “This is the sweetest doll I have ever seen!” she sighs. A little boy looks at his playfellow absolutely doubtful. With an I-know-it-all-face he says: “If something is sweet, it is sweet and it can not be sweeter, pah!”

You continue walking and see the mothers of those two children sitting on a bench. You pick up some words:” Your daughter is the sweetest girl I have ever seen…” Are the children of these mothers perhaps more clever then their own mothers? The truth is bitter: Yes! A lot of grown-ups have forgotten the basics of the German language during their life, it is like a huge amnesia which spreads wider and wider.

It would not be so bad but unfortunately this amnesia goes on and on and on…
Actually Germans just have four cases: nominative, genitive, accusative and dative. Four is actually not a lot but Germans minimize that even low number and instead of using the genitive they always use the dative. The German genitive is on the best way to be wiped out. Perhaps the children of the little boy and girl in the park do not know the genitive anymore in some years.

Let us consider the German articles: For all non-Germans, there are three articles, for feminine expressions ‘die’, for male ‘der’ and for neutral ones ‘das’. Please ask a German on the street who is perhaps standing in front of a shop-window considering a nice lamp: “Why is it ‘die Lampe’ (the lamp)? “ Why is a lamp feminine, does a lamp have feminine traits? Actually I have never talked to lamp, asking her, if she likes shining in the dark. A lamp in definitely neutral, it does not talk, cry nor is it happy or sad, it is a material something, the only skill a lamp has is shining or burn though.

The German language is sometimes like a glimmering something which you can not catch or understand. How shall foreigners understand German when even Germans do not?

Auf Wiedersehen, German greetings
Sara

PS:
Actually nobody should take that entry to seriously, especially not Germans because this entry was written by a German girl. Something I want to say is that languages are alive, they are developing every day, and so all these “mistakes” are just a product of a developing language which shows us that our language is still alive and will not die out. Better a wrong (;-)) language than no language!