You know you want to protect the German language

Tony Patterson has written a fun but interesting piece in the Independent on attempts to protect German language in the constitution.

The campaign to defend Die deutsche Sprache has not been launched by some obscure group of language professors, but from one of the main centres of German political power: the party of Chancellor Angela Merkel. Her ruling conservative Christian Democrats are poised to copy France and enshrine the nation's language in the constitution.

I particularly liked this paragraph which calls Denglish a poisonous porridge:

the move is also an attempt to guard against what many see as an insidious and virtually unstoppable corruption of German by "Denglish", the increasingly widespread incorporation of English words and phrases. Denglish has infuriated the German academic world. The writer, Matthias Schreiber, recently described the phenomenon in Der Spiegel magazine as, "A poisonous porridge of magma which is burying a whole cultural landscape beneath it".