“Mit dem Topping bin ich auch fein”–Anglicisms in a German TV cooking show « Mit dem Topping bin ich auch fein » –Anglicismes dans une émission de cuisine de la télévision allemande

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See https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/171203/umfrage/interesse-an-kochshows-im-fernsehen/ [last access: 23 February 2022].

2TV cooking shows are going from strength to strength, and recent years have seen the emergence of a variety of formats. Oren (2013, p. 20-21) points out that “[p]opular food-themed TV programmes are so pervasive that, in many parts of the globe, a viewer can watch uninterrupted foodTV for twenty-four hours a day, everyday (sic).” Cooking shows have been around for a long time, as the first programme in Britain was broadcast at the end of the 1930s (Davidson, 2014); Collins (2008) describes the years from 1946-1962 as the Early Period of televised cooking shows in the US; and the first German programme of this kind, “Bitte in zehn Minuten zu Tisch” (Dinner Will Be Served in Ten Minutes) was broadcast in 1953 (Schmelz, 2018). In 2021, around 5.3 million Germans aged 14 or older very much enjoyed watching TV cooking shows such as “Das perfekte Dinner” (The Perfect Dinner) or “Die Küchenschlacht”¹.

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These are the amateur cooks’ tasks at the time of writing this article. They have varied over the course of the show, in previous years including, for example, the task to cook a meal with a limited selection of ingredients or to prepare both a starter and a main dish.

8The TV cooking show that serves as a basis of this investigation is the cooking competition “Die Küchenschlacht” (The Kitchen Battle), a 45-minute show that has been broadcast on ZDF (Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen ‘Second German Television’), a German public-service television broadcaster), from Monday to Friday since 2008. It is a competition in which six amateur cooks compete against each other. On Monday, the contestants prepare their favourite dish, on Tuesday a starter, on Wednesday a vegetarian dish, on Thursday a main course based on a specific theme, and on Friday a dish following a recipe set by the celebrity chef who hosts the show². In a tasting at the end of each programme, another celebrity chef decides which of the contestants will be eliminated. While preparing their dishes, the contestants converse with the host, answering questions about ingredients, preparation methods, but also about their hobbies and personal lives.

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Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, from 23 March 2020 there was no audience in the studio.

1. The host welcomes the viewers at home and in the studio³.

2. Video clips of scenes from the previous show present a recap, reminding viewers about the contestant who was eliminated. In video clips, the host and some of the amateur cooks give their opinions about the show, and the contestant who had to leave the show bids farewell to the others.

3. The host announces the show’s theme or the contestants’ tasks as well as the celebrity chef who will evaluate their dishes at the end of the show.

4. In video clips, some of the contestants comment on the choice of judge.

5. The contestants, who have in the meantime already started cooking so as to make the most of the 35 minutes at their disposal, present their dishes. They have usually already practised their dishes at home, and a photograph of the result is shown and commented on by the host.

6. The contestants continue cooking. They are asked by the host to describe their progress. Occasionally, the host comments on this, tastes parts of the meals or reacts to problems that he or she may become aware of. On Thursdays and Fridays, the host prepares a dish himself/herself.

7. A countdown accompanied by studio effects tells the amateur cooks that they have only two more minutes to finish their dishes and to prepare them for presentation.

8. The amateur cooks evaluate their own dishes and, occasionally, describe difficulties that they had to overcome.

9. The host welcomes the celebrity chef.

10. The celebrity chef evaluates the contestants’ dishes and chooses both a winner and a cook who has to leave the show.

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Transcription conventions include: (text) parentheses indicate uncertainty on the transcriber’s part; text- a single dash indicates an abrupt cut-off or self-interruption in the flow of speech; TEXT capital letters indicate special emphasis.

13The material used for this study includes a random selection of video recordings of 158 cooking shows broadcast in the years from 2018 to 2021. With our focus on naturally occurring communication, elements (B) and (D) were excluded from the analysis, as these mainly comprise repeat scenes and clips that were prepared prior to the show. The dataset amounts to about 115 hours of video recordings with about 500 contestants and 22 celebrity chefs. Its analysis resulted in a collection of 390 Anglicisms in total, of which 246 (=63.1%) are words and 144 (=36.9%) phraseological units. Due to time constraints, only the passages containing Anglicisms have been fully transcribed. The transcription conventions, tailored to the needs of this study, are based mainly on the systems of Levinson (1983), Firth (1996) and Wagner & Firth (1997)⁴.

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Cf. https://lex-it.inl.nl/lexit2/?db=glad&lang=en.

14The identification of Anglicisms can be difficult, given that a large number of them occur as loan translations (calques), which are inconspicuous due to the lack of salience. Changes in the vocabulary of a language do not need to be a result of language contact, but can also be caused by the revitalization of lexis from an earlier period. In a previous study (Fiedler, 2012), four criteria were proposed to determine the English provenance of lexical material: (1) use in an English-speaking context (including translations), (2) explicit metacommunicative signalling of the origin (e.g. as the English say), (3) variability of form, and (4) parallel developments in other languages. As regards the fourth criterion, the joint endeavour by researchers to compile a Global Anglicism Database (GLAD) has provided important insights⁵. This study also utilises corpus-based approaches. Steyer (2004, p. 93) introduced the term “consultation paradigm” (Konsultationsparadigma) to describe the method where a corpus is used to obtain data which test a hypothesis that was made about a unit previously. This approach was adopted here: the collection of potential Anglicisms compiled by the author of this article was verified by means of the corpus of the Institut für Deutsche Sprache (IDS) in Mannheim (DeReKo-2021-I) (See 4.2.).

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There is only one occurrence of safe as a noun modifier: ein safer Gang (‘a safe dish’).

• Determiner + Adjective (in superlative form) + Noun + ever, (e.g. die romantischste Küchenschlacht ever ‘the most romantic Küchenschlacht ever’ [8 February 2018]);

• Noun [denominating a dish] + reloaded (e.g. Brot-Suppe reloaded ‘bread soup reloaded’ [16 November 2020])

• Noun + be + safe / be + safe [with something] (e.g. das Fleisch ist safe ‘the meat is safe’ (29 January 2021) / Was macht deine Ente? Bist du safe damit? (24 May 2019) [How is your duck? Are you on the safe side with it?]⁶.

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Researchers determine different threshold values: Onysko (2007) considers Anglicisms occurring more than three times in his corpus to be “frequent”; Moon (2008) includes items with a frequency of three, taking Evert’s (2004) statistical analyses as a basis; Quasthoff et al. (2010) point out that a phraseological unit with a frequency of ten can be identified automatically in web corpora.

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Last access 8 March 2022.

28Table 2 presents twenty Anglicisms from our dataset that occurred at least five times⁷, together with the number of their occurrences in DeReKo and the languages for which the unit has also been established as an Anglicism in GLAD⁸. The list includes eleven word lexemes and nine phraseological units.

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For some of the Anglicisms in this list, the data found in DeReKo have to be checked carefully, as the corpus includes passages of English text. The year 1948 as the first evidence of Challenge, for example, is misleading. Carstensen et al. (1994, p. 642), in their article “Herausforderung” (challenge), point out that in contrast to the German loan translation the English form Challenge has not gained acceptance. See also the comments on am Ende des Tages (at the end of the day), nice, easy and tricky.

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This attitude is also reflected in the following posts on the show’s Facebook page. E.g.:
- Ich musste schon wieder nachschauen: „Bist du in shape?!!!“ Die Medienwelt ist durchzogen von Anglizismen […] Was soll das? Fühlen sich die, die es benutzen, besser, klüger oder was?
- Die fühlen sich cooler. Der Rest lacht darüber. (18 January 2021) https://en-gb.facebook.com/pg/Kuechenschlacht/posts/
[- I had to look something up again. “Are you in shape?!!!” The media is riddled with Anglicisms (…) What’s the point? Do those who use it feel better, smarter, or what?
- They feel cooler. The others laugh about it.]

39The frequent translation of English expressions into German could also be explained by the fact that, in public service television, hosts might feel obliged to make sure that the audience is able to understand everything. The use of Anglicisms is not entirely undisputed among the German public. Some people are concerned about the dominant role of English and, from a language cultivation perspective, some even consider the massive borrowing to be a threat to their mother tongue¹⁰. The following conversation between a contestant and the host might be seen in this context (see also example [17]). However, more detailed investigation, including interviews with hosts and contestants of the show, would be necessary to confirm this assumption.

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It is difficult to find clear-cut differences between borrowing and code-switching. A number of authors have discussed the relationship between these two types of contact form, using criteria such as frequency, degrees of assimilation and existence of an equivalent in the receiving language (Gardner-Chloras, 2013; Matras, 2009, p. 110-114; Myers-Scotton, 1992; Onysko, 2007; Romaine, 1995).

40In this regard, it is worth mentioning that English words and phrases in our dataset are not always used in the same way as in the donor language. Deviations concern their form (e.g. step for step [18 June 2020], relative easy [24 March 2020]), pronunciation (e.g. finger pronounced fɪŋə at the beginning and fɪŋgə at the end of the show [9 September 2021]), their pragmatic use (e.g. Dann müssen jetzt die Linsen dazu ‘Then the lentils have to be added now’. – Thanks for asking. [9 July 2020]), and translation (Morgen ist ein Motto, das ist großarrtig–Simply the best. Die absolut simplen, leichten Geschichten werden wir kochen. [Tomorrow we’ll have a great theme–Simply the Best. We’ll prepare absolutely simple, easy things]). English borrowings certainly have their point of departure with bilingual speakers (Haspelmath 2008). Their further use and dispersal, however, can be attributed to people with lower degrees of bilingualism, including speakers “with only a few words and phrases in a second language” (Li 2000, p. 6). Busse (2005, p. 67) writes about people’s motivation for using Anglicisms: “For many speakers with only limited knowledge their meaning is often only vague, but these words seem to convey an air of fashionable prestige.”¹¹

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See also Fiedler (2013) on phraseological units used in this function in the genre of talk shows.

41The third function of Anglicisms that can be observed in the dataset is connected with the discursive character of the cooking shows. The amateur cooks have to prepare their meals and converse with the host at the same time. The use of prefabricated speech, i.e. of ready-made constructions that the speaker does not have to produce laboriously, but can reproduce holistically from memory, seems to be a solution to such difficult communicative situations, and the origin of the reproduced material does not seem to matter. The use of catchphrases or clichés (including those in English) can help “bridge gaps” in the show when people do not know what to say or how to react¹². This can happen when contestants are pressed for time or become aware of mishaps, or when accidents in the cooking process occur (see examples [26] and [27]).

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See, for example, analyses of the shows MasterChef and Nailed It! by Philips (2016), Oren (2013), and Kutlu (2021).

43Finally, a specific pragmatic function should be mentioned: the use of English borrowings in judgements. As described in Section 2, the evaluation of the dishes by a celebrity chef constitutes the climax of a competitive cooking show. In contrast to a number of other TV programmes in which the contestants have to face harsh criticism or even aggressive and humiliating judgements¹³, the final evaluations in “Die Küchenschlacht” are nuanced and positive. More often than not, judges express how difficult it is for them to eliminate one of the amateur cooks and to choose the best dish. Positive criticism and sharing skills and knowledge seem to prevail even in this last part of the show. In this context, Anglicisms seem to fulfil two tasks. Firstly, they can be used to emphasise favourable assessments, as in [30] to [32]. Viewers have the impression that German expressions are simply not enough to praise the quality of a particular dish. Words such as nice, powerful and outstanding permeate the judgements.