“Words are not just words. We do things with words.” And among the things we can do with words is express our attitude towards something. We can say things in a certain way to express it as a fact, or as something unreal, or to show that we want to be neutral about whether something is true or not. For these purposes and more, we have the subjunctive mood – in German, the Konjunktiv. In this episode I talk to Verena Hofstätter, a linguist and German teacher from Vienna. Together we take a dive into the German subjunctive – what it looks like, when it’s used, and why it’s suffering an identity ..read more

NOTE: In this episode, I say the following: "In simple terms, an AFAB queen is a cisgender woman who does drag as a drag queen." While AFAB queens are very often cisgender women, and the term is typically used to describe cisgender women doing drag, this is not necessarily the case for everyone. Anyone who does drag and was assigned female at birth can be considered an AFAB queen, and this can include trans men, non-binary people and more. Apologies for the confusion and the inaccuracy! ***** Right now, the drag scene in Vienna is experiencing a period of real blossoming on the one hand, but ..read more

Moving to a new country and starting a new life there is no small undertaking. There are some major changes that you can foresee, like having to get used to a new language, but there are so many smaller, day-to-day differences that you might not see coming and that can catch you off-guard. In this final episode of series 2, I talk to Dana Newman (YouTube "Wanted Adventure"), an American living in Germany. We talk about what it’s like to move abroad to Germany as an American, what culture shocks she experienced when she arrived, and all about her experiences with the German language as a newbie ..read more

South Tyrol is an autonomous, majority German-speaking region in Italy bordering Austria and Switzerland. It's one of the few places outside of Germany, Austria and Switzerland where German is an official language, alongside Italian and Ladin. But while these three languages are all recognised today, it was a difficult road to get here - the people of South Tyrol suffered some dark chapters which had awful consequences for families and communities, throwing their identity as South Tyroleans into question. In this episode I talk to Richard Bonomo, a South Tyrolean living in Vienna, about the h ..read more

This episode is all about idioms in German! We look at a few German expressions, what they mean and where they come from. What does it mean if you plant someone, if you leave the church in the village, or if you throw yourself over the houses? And when is it good to be punched in the face? I talk to Vanessa Krebs about some of her favourite German idioms and expressions, as well as a couple of her favourite English phrases too. Content warning: Mention of the Holocaust. If you do not want to listen to this part, skip 20:17 to 22:28. Episode transcript: https://yellowoftheegg.com/transcripts ..read more

How can corporate language contribute to a company’s brand? Why do companies often have at least two different voices that they use to speak to the same customers? And how can organisations deal with the issue of gender-sensitive writing in German, maintaining the balance between inclusion, readability and aesthetics? In this episode I talk to Martin Dunkl, a public relations consultant who specialises in corporate identity. We talk about ways a company’s language can be used to build its brand and identity, including how a text can be made more understandable to readers, the effect of using d ..read more

How much does a language constitute one’s identity? Are you a different person when you speak a different language, or even a different dialect? If you speak multiple languages and dialects, which one is really you? In this episode I talk to Katie Resch, a PhD student at the University of Vienna. We talk about being bilingual, identifying with “Austrianness”, and the question of feeling and sounding fake when speaking in different dialects. Episode transcript: https://yellowoftheegg.com/transcripts/s2e7-language-dialect-and-identity-transcript/ Guest: Katie Resch Outro music by Euphoniques ..read more

Harsh. Angry. Rough. These are words that are often used to describe how German sounds. But why do many people have this impression? What about the German language makes it sound so hard? And does German sound different to native speakers than to non-native speakers? In this episode I talk to François Conrad, a researcher and teacher of linguistics at the Leibniz University Hannover. We talk about the five features of German he has identified as being responsible for the 'barking' nature of the language. We look at the difference between word languages and syllable languages, how German's 'ha ..read more

Texas German is a peculiar and endangered dialect, and time is running out to research it. What is this variety, and how did it come to be? What do Texas German speakers sound like? And what efforts are being made to preserve and record this dying dialect? In this episode I talk to Hans C. Boas, professor for Germanic Linguistics at the University of Texas at Austin, and the director of the Texas German Dialect Project. We talk about the history and development of Texas German, as well as the features that make it unique among the other dialects of German in the US and in Europe. We also hear ..read more

What does it take to create a brand-new, gender-neutral grammar system for German? What do you have to consider when coming up with new language forms? And what is it like to be non-binary while speaking such a strongly gendered language such as German? In this episode I talk to Jona Moro and Noah Frank, who have taken it upon themselves to create a whole new grammatical system for German, the NoNa system, which allows people to talk about others in a gender-neutral way. We talk about why it is necessary for them to come up with new grammar forms, how they arrived at the forms they ended up w ..read more