Abstract:

The objective of the present paper is to analyze one of the vivid trends in the professional discourse of advertising, namely English borrowings, the peculiarities of their usage in German and work out a number of rules to help students to use them correctly in written and oral speech. The research was carried out on the basis of specialised German online-magazines and forums in the spheres of marketing and advertising.

The reasons for special interest towards the use of English borrowings in German advertising circles are quite evident. The quantity of borrowings from the English language is increasing in connection with the reduction of assimilation of the borrowed elements in the German language system. The wide spread of English among the advertising specialists in Germany has resulted in copying English words: fewer changes are made to the spelling and pronunciation, while cases of morphological and semantic integration abound.

The authors of the current paper focus on two main aspects of the topic:
1) the changes English borrowings undergo in the German language (namely in German advertising discourse);
2) the actions teachers should undertake to elaborate the optimal methods of teaching Advertising and PR students to use English borrowings appropriately.

«Advertising and PR» students studying at People’s’ Friendship University of Russia often choose German as a foreign language in addition to English. That is why they face the problem of interference of English and American borrowings in German oral and written speech. The knowledge of English helps them to understand the meaning of these borrowings but they can be confused. For example, the authors have found out that difficulties occur in choosing an upper- or lower-case letters at the beginning of nouns, joined-up or separate spelling, hyphenating certain compound words; finding the gender, making the plural, declining borrowed nouns, etc.

The authors come to the conclusion that analyzing the peculiarities of assimilation of the English borrowings in advertising and PR, formulating a number of rules and implementing them in the teaching process is very important for developing students’ correct use of written and spoken forms of German advertising discourse, which is nowadays highly enriched with English borrowings.

Keywords:

Integration of borrowings, assimilation of English borrowings, professional discourse of advertising.