The relationship between German and English isn’t just structural—the two languages have borrowed words from each other throughout history in ways that go unnoticed in everyday life.
German words that English has simply adopted
- Kindergarten — used in English exactly as in German, without translation
- Angst — incorporated into English to describe a specific kind of existential anxiety
- Zeitgeist — “zeitgeist,” used in cultural/philosophical contexts in English
- Schadenfreude — mentioned earlier, has become part of formal English vocabulary
- Doppelgänger — lookalike, widely used in colloquial English
English words that German has adopted back
Modern German, especially among young people, has incorporated a huge amount of vocabulary from English: "chillen" (to relax), "downloaden" (to download a file), "das Meeting" (meeting), "cool" (used exactly as in Portuguese/English). This phenomenon even has a specific name: Denglisch (a blend of Deutsch + English).
The common historical root
German and English both stem from Proto-Germanic, a common ancestral language spoken thousands of years ago—this explains why basic everyday words (family, body, nature) often sound similar in both languages, even without recent language borrowing.
Why this is more than just a curiosity
Recognizing these historical connections helps you see German not as a “strange and isolated” language, but as part of a language family with which you’re probably already more familiar than you realize—through English itself.
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