Football language

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The language of the soccer game is a special language or group language that grew out of the sports game soccer . It is integrated into the broader field of sports languages ​​and has established itself on different language levels.

Football language as jargon

Cover of the pamphlet of the Stuttgart gymnastics teacher Karl Planck
Football games 1872 (press drawing. Illustrates the scenery and atmosphere from which the language emerged.)

The “soccer jargon ”, also “soccer slang” or “technical jargon soccer”, can be considered the lowest language level and the original language and communication form of the game. Originating from a street game, regionally different folk expressions for playground equipment, ball handling and playing technique developed, which corresponded to the sometimes rough tone of the early days. They also mark the language of the critics who dealt with the new sport. As early as 1898, the gymnastics teacher Karl Planck from the Eberhard-Ludwigs-Gymnasium in Stuttgart railed against the “English disease” in a diatribe, which he called “squeezing ball game” and “foot slipping”. As recently as 1953, the anthropologist FFJ Buytendijk characterized football as a rough sport for men, whose rough “kicking” and “being kicked” and correspondingly rough vocabulary excluded it as a women's sport .

A vocabulary rich in images, often drastic, has been handed down from the football-loving Ruhr area, which is still in use in street football today. The “Ball” play equipment is also known as “Egg”, “(P) fluff”, “Flemme” or “Cucumber”. "Kiste" stands for "gate". Expressions such as "pöhlen", "fummeln", "flerzen" or "bolt" denote different forms of technical ball handling. While “Pöhler” dubbed the aggressive daredevil, the cautious player was rated as “pince-nez”. The so-called “Fummler” is a ball technician who loves himself and does not tend to shoot at goal. Thanks to the Pöhler cap from the coach of Borussia Dortmund , Jürgen Klopp , the slang expression gained a degree of awareness beyond the Ruhr region.

In a language study from the 1950s, Siegbert A. Warwitz quotes a passage from the local newspaper report from a Schalke game : Szepan fished the egg from the mess and gurgled the flemish against the lid of the box. She gonged back against Tilkowski's pear and with an acrobatic puller (p) Kuzorra planted the (P) fluff in the mesh. The Klodt (= Schalke goalkeeper) tore it smoothly from the tiller (= the legs).

Football language as technical language

Approach to the "direct free kick"

With the increasing demands on the rules, the ball technique, the methodology and the tactical and strategic finesse of the sport game, but above all with the emergence of sport science in the 1950s, a more precise terminology developed in the theory and practice of the soccer game was only accessible to those familiar with the game and experts. Technical terms such as “ free kick ”, “ penalty area ”, “ offside ”, “ offside trap ” or “ swallow ” are used for proper communication between players, coaches, referees and the competition requirements. The journalist Walter Haubrich was the first to lexically capture and describe the richly pictorial language of sport, especially football. Others followed him with special glossaries and dictionaries .

Football terminology in colloquial and high-level language

With the increasing popularity and the spread of the sport game, vocabulary and idioms finally found their way into common everyday language. This was done primarily in the form of metaphors , language images that were supposed to illustrate and symbolize comparable facts and behaviors. As early as the 1960s, SA Warwitz dealt with the metaphorics of sports language and developed analyzes and teaching examples for German lessons: Phrases like “stay on the ball”, “play in a team” or “afford an own goal” are examples of this type more common Adoptions in the standard language.

Football and soldier language

The language used in the football game is sometimes criticized because of its proximity to the military sector and the language of the soldiers : enthusiastic reporters sometimes fall into the style of war correspondents . There is shooting, bombing, the opponent tactically tricked, the defense overrun, attack strategies are developed. Vocabulary such as “storm”, “shoot”, “shoot”, “bomb”, “fire a grenade”, “attack”, “defense”, “form a front”, “defensive ring” actually approach war rhetoric and awaken it Especially in people who think pacifistically or who have been traumatized by the atrocities of war, intuitively defensive feelings. It does not satisfy some that “war” is defused into “fight” and “enemy” into “opponent” in sports games.

Cultural and historical achievement

To describe football language as a cultural contribution seems absurd at first glance in view of the sometimes drastic expressions in street communication and some reporting services. Nevertheless, from a linguistic and linguistic historical point of view, this classification is considered appropriate, and the cultural achievement is seen as creative:

The football jargon as the crude language of the "initiated" is characterized by its haunting, drastic imagery, its emotional charge and its hearty humor. It is a sloppy language that has sprung from the soul of the people and has creative elements that are differentiated and pointed. Onomatopoeic expressions such as “flerzen” or “Flemme” do not live from their cognitively perceptible meaning, but from their emotionally perceptible meaningfulness. Pictorial words such as “egg” or “cucumber” convey an immediately catchy visual impression of the dynamic movement of the ball, as can be experienced above all in street games with replacement balls such as scraps of leather or rag balls. The term "whistle" for an unaccepted referee ties in with his main activity. The often sarcastic language creations have a community-building effect and create exclusivity for the group of athletes. Football enthusiasts develop their own identity through the use of language, which distinguishes members and outsiders. So the “Kumpeldeutsch” also contributes to the diversity and color not only of the language landscape in the field of football matches.

In contrast to jargon, football terminology is characterized by more objectivity. She excels with very precise, science-compatible expressions and terms. The standardized terminology used in specialist books enables a differentiated intellectual examination of the football game phenomenon and its technical, tactical, methodological, psychological, educational and social contexts. In contrast to slang, it is on a cultivated level of language, but mostly needs clarification for those unfamiliar with football, such as the terms " blood stick ", banana flank "," candle or " chain of four ". This language level is also mostly pictorial, but at a higher language level, whereby the transitions are mostly fluid.

The high-level language benefits above all from the vivid imagery, which has found its way into everyday language as metaphors and which, due to the game's great popularity, are widely understood spontaneously, such as the expressions “stay on the ball”, “bring up team spirit” or “an own goal shoot".

The idioms from the military sector in the football language lose their critical relevance if one takes note of the fact that corresponding transfers of meaning have also found their way into general colloquial language, hardly noticed or objected to. In the same way as in football German, in colloquial German, dramatic scenes with bellicose vocabulary are put into the picture, for example in the sequence of images: “The bomb burst” after “a lot of explosive had already accumulated in advance,” “in the heated debate with a sharp one Ammunition was shot "and finally" the unsuccessful vice was shot and the chairman was shot down by the general meeting ":

When criticizing the warlike choice of words, it is mostly overlooked that it is a matter of a metaphor that seeks to emphasize the combat-oriented events and the dynamics of the sports game, but has nothing to do with the associated bloody war. It is another level of reality that is fundamentally characteristic of games. The aggressiveness necessary for the success of the game is tamed by rules, fairness guidelines and referees and kept within reasonable limits.

Through new language creations, which mostly originate from the lower language level, the language remains alive and gains fresh expressiveness, which can also enrich the vocabulary of the general colloquial language.

literature

  • Werner Boschmann: Lexicon of the Ruhr area language from Aalskuhle to Zymtzicke. With the highlights of German literature - in pure Ruhr German. Verlag Henselowsky Boschmann, Essen 1993, ISBN 3-922750-01-X .
  • Dieter Bott, Marvin Chlada , Gerd Dembowski : Ball and pear. To the criticism of the prevailing football culture. Hamburg 1998, ISBN 3-87975-711-9 .
  • Armin Burkhardt: Dictionary of Football Language. Verlag Die Werkstatt, Göttingen 2006, ISBN 3-89533-530-4 .
  • FFJ Buytendijk: The football game , Werkbund-Verlag, Würzburg 1953.
  • Walter Haubrich: The visual language of sport in contemporary German. Schorndorf 1965.
  • Uwe Loll: Modern football language. Leipzig 2012. ISBN 978-3-95488-041-6 .
  • Christoph Marx : The whole point is the ball. The wondrous language of football, Dudenverlag Berlin 2018. ISBN 978-3-411-73394-1
  • Dieter Möhn: Specialized and group languages. In: Lothar Hoffmann (Ed.): Technical languages. An international handbook for language research and terminology science. De Gruyter, Berlin 1998, ISBN 3-11-011101-2 , pp. 168-181.
  • Karl Planck: Foot lolling. About the ball game and English illness. Verlag W. Kohlhammer, Stuttgart 1898.
  • Alex Raack: He MUST do it. Phrases, poses, platitudes - the wonderful world of FOOTBALL Clichés. Hamburg 2015, ISBN 978-3-8419-0361-7 .
  • Siegbert A. Warwitz, Anita Rudolf: From the sense of playing. Reflections and game ideas. 4th edition, Verlag Schneider, Baltmannsweiler 2016, ISBN 978-3-8340-1664-5 .
  • Siegbert A. Warwitz: Sport in the Mirror of Language - an Analysis of Metaphors. Tübingen 1967.
  • Siegbert A. Warwitz: Pleasure and frustration at the soccer game. Learn to deal with feelings. In: thing-word-number. 125 (2012) pp. 4-13. ISSN  0949-6785 .
  • Peter Wippermann (Ed.): Duden. Dictionary of scene languages. Trend office. Duden, Mannheim et al. 2000, ISBN 3-411-70951-0 .

Web links

Single receipts

  1. ↑ Peter Wippermann (Ed.): Duden. Dictionary of scene languages. Trend office. Duden, Mannheim et al. 2000
  2. ^ Karl Planck: Fusslümmelei. About the ball game and English illness. Verlag W. Kohlhammer, Stuttgart 1898, - with cover picture quoted from SA Warwitz: Pleasure and frustration at the football game. Learn to deal with feelings. In: Case-Word-Number 125 (2012) p. 6.
  3. ^ FFJ Buytendijk: The football game. Werkbund-Verlag, Würzburg 1953
  4. ↑ BVB. The Swabian is still in “Pöhler” Klopp . ( The West Online )
  5. ^ Siegbert A. Warwitz: Sport in the mirror of language - a metaphor analysis . Tübingen 1967. page 20
  6. ^ Rainer Moritz: Offside. The final secret of football 2010
  7. ^ A b c Walter Haubrich: The visual language of sport in contemporary German , Schorndorf 1965
  8. ^ Armin Burkhardt: Dictionary of Football Language. Publishing house Die Werkstatt, Göttingen 2006
  9. ^ A b Siegbert A. Warwitz: Sport in the mirror of language - a metaphor analysis. Tübingen 1967.
  10. ^ A b Siegbert A. Warwitz, Anita Rudolf: The Metaphorics of the War Game. In: Dies .: The sense of playing. Reflections and game ideas. 4th edition, Baltmannsweiler 2016, ISBN 978-3-8340-1664-5 , pp. 126-136
  11. ↑ Dieter Bott, Marvin Chlada, Gerd Dembowski: Ball and pear. To the criticism of the prevailing football culture. Hamburg 1998
  12. ↑ Dieter Möhn: Specialized languages ​​and group languages. In: Lothar Hoffmann (Ed.): Technical languages. An international handbook for language research and terminology science. De Gruyter, Berlin 1998.
  13. ^ Werner Boschmann: Lexicon of the Ruhr area language from Aalskuhle to Zymtzicke. With the highlights of German literature - in pure Ruhr German. Publishing house Henselowsky Boschmann, Essen 1993