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I'm posting this to ask if there is this same phenomenon in other countries as well. In Germany, the decline of the written but first and foremost spoken language is reaching astonishing levels. Of course we all notice old people use some outfashioned terms and somehow more complicated phrases and such. I don't mean that. I'm referring to the fact that young people (15-25) have very much lost the skill to develop more or less complex sentences, express a thought with rigour, or justify a conclusion. This is to be seen even at University, where students when they rise to speak at a lecture etc, rely all the time to fillers ("halt", "quasi", "eben"), depriving these words of their actual meaning and most of the times giving empty statements. This is, of course, also noticeable when young people appear in television.
The culmination of this process is the abusive and non-stoppable use of English terms. I don't mean taking a foreign term for something which has no own word in a given language, which can be acceptable: I'm talking about constantly using English words or phrases instead of the alread existing German ones. Like saying "whatever", "workshop", "sorry", "comeback", "train", just to name a couple of them I heard the last days. Needless to say, there's a perfectly normal German word for all of those examples, but for some reason people won't use them. I bet this is an attempt to gain coolness, seeing it is also widespread among students, pretending intellectuals (often found in trendy bars drinking wine etc). But this is losing the essence of a language and degrading it to some kind of soulless trendy mix. I find it disgusting.
And in the case of German, it's not like it is a very modern and not developed language who doesn't have enough cultural tradition, writers etc so that they need to borrow from outside
So, do you see something similar in your countries? What do you think about it?
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