Germany is linguistically stuck in the 1880s As much as I like Germany, there are several issues on which the country feels like it is stuck in the 1980s, including: spectacular insouciance with regards to health and safety, the continuing popularity of some of that decade's more gruesome "musicians" (David Hasselhoff...), and a lingering love for the mullet. Then there's the fact that you can still light up in many bars, as well as a strong (and highly unionised) coal-mining industry... The area in which Germany really is most behind the times, however, is the use of language. A few weeks ago, a debate flared up when a publisher of children's books decided to produce a new edition of Otfried Preussler's 1957 "The Little Witch" (Die kleine Hexe) without a range of discriminatory vocabulary - most explosively, the word Neger, which translates depending on context as either the embarrassingly outdated "negro" or the very nasty "n-----." Cue a few weeks of familiar "It's political correctness gone mad!" flapping as (white) Germans fretted that they would, at this rate, soon no longer be able to say things like schwarzes Scharf for black sheep or schwarz arbeiten for working off the books. It's a depressingly stale debate that was exhaustively thrashed out in America in the 70s and 80s, and then in Britain a few years later - with the positive result that both societies adopted less offensive uses of language without having to resort to the kind of ridiculously artificial jargon so feared and parodied at the time. I find it, to say the least, somewhat odd that modern Germany, which has some of the most progressive anti-discrimination legislation in the Western world, a brutally self-critical attitude towards its 20th-century history, and 50 years of broadly successful large-scale immigration under its belt, should be so hung up on a few old-fashioned words. For a while, I thought the answer might be quite simple. Although roughly 10 per cent of both the German and the British population were born outside of the country, due to its overseas imperial history, Britain has had far more African and Afro-Caribbean immigration than Germany, with the result that there are less people in Germany who would feel directly offended by words like Neger. It's certainly true that, while even left-leaning nationals like Die Zeit have recently argued against redacting this and other racist language out of children's books, it is hard to imagine them embracing similar use of words like Kanake, formerly in widespread use to describe the Turkish and other darker-skinned southern European immigrants who are now such an important part of German society. I clearly haven't cracked it, though, because everywhere you look, the German language really is quite discriminatory, especially with regard to a group that is actually in the (very slight) majority: women. It's an aspect of the debate that is hard to hear when high-calibre ordnance is exploding across the linguistic battlefield, but in terms of gender-neutrality, Germany isn't stuck in the 1980s - it's in the 1880s. Sentences that just assume that everyone in business is male are something I come across in my work as a translator again and again. Small- and medium-sized companies especially like to talk about how customer-friendly they are in phraseology that, without a serious amount of adaptation, sounds positively Victorian in English: "When the customer calls, he can expect to speak directly to a consultant. The consultant will always make every effort to satisfy the customer's wishes - after all, his job is to listen to the customer. So here we have a company who - to judge by its description - only employs male consultants, who then only deal with male customers. Some of this imbalance is due to the fact that gender is (as any poor little oik currently doing GCSE German will tell you) inherent in German: der Kunde, the customer, is masculine. To make it feminine, I'd have to change it to die Kundin, and then I'd have to mention both to keep things even and call them either "he/she" or "it" for the rest of the text. English has the same problem with pronouns - no one wants to call their customer "it" - but gets round it nicely by just making a plural of everything: "When customers call our company, they can expect to speak directly to our consultants, who will always try to make their customer's wishes come true. After all, their job is to listen to their customers! See, all better - well, from a gender standpoint at least... Yet the level of antique testosterone in German business-speak barely seems to have dawned on, let alone started worrying anyone - even businesswomen. This may change, though, after communications consultant Anne Wizorek recently started a Twitter trending topic denouncing casual sexism following a report about a leading politician's somewhat, ahem, antiquated attempts to interact with female journalists. I wonder if the spark of controversy will set all this linguistic dead wood ablaze? I certainly hope so, because on issues like these, it's high time Germany looked to the future - or maybe just across the Channel. Yet something tells me that, like smoky bars or unionised pits, this is one area where the 1980s will be alive and well and living in Germany for a while yet.