‘BioDeutsch’: Germany’s Orwellian ‘UnWord of the Year’ Slammed For Existing to Describe European Natives

A panel of German linguists have selected their ‘Unword of the Year’, decrying it for supporting “racist, biological form of nationality” despite the komposita apparently only really being used by migration-heritage Germans to satirise the legacy majority.

‘BioDeutsch‘, or BioGerman, is Germany’s Unwort des Jahres 2024. Chosen by a panel of linguists annually since German reunification, the purpose of the Orwellian annual exercise is ostensibly to “draw attention to public forms of language use and thereby promote language awareness”.

The judges in their decision said they had selected BioGerman as their Unword of the year because they found it was used to “devalue Germans with a migration background”, given it is used to express the opposite of ‘Germans of migrant background’. “This division into supposedly ‘real’ Germans and second-class Germans that accompanies the use of Biodeutsch is a form of everyday racism”, they noted.

The Unword committee noted BioGerman was created as a satirical phrase, but insisted it met their criteria anyway as it could be used in a racist way. This decision was criticised in Germany’s broadsheet newspaper of record Die Welt who asserted that not only was BioDeutsch a satirical creation, but it had never been adopted by the right-wing or German racists and was only actually ever used publicly and prominently by migration-background Germans to describe others.

The decision is proof of the political bias of the Unword committee, the paper asserted.

Yet that the Unword prize exists purely to score political points and has done for years can be easily ascertained from not just the judge’s published selection criteria, but also the words and runners-up picked for years past. Per the Unword body, the public can nominate words but they can only be chosen if they “violate the principle of human dignity”, if they “violate the principles of democracy”, if they “discriminate against, stigmatise and defame individual social groups”.

In short, the winner is the politically undesirable word of the year. Common entries in recent years have been words and komposita (German compound words) that are perceived as slighting mass migration or climate change activism. For instance 2022 brought up ‘climate terrorist’, a no-no and part ogf a “network of bad words” against green politics because it “defames”, stigmatises, and discredits activists.

Runner-up for 2024  importierter Antisemitismus (imported antisemitism) earns its place because by describing now-rapidly rising antisemitism in Germany as a problem coming in from the outside excludes “Muslims and people with a migration background” and, it is claimed, is a tactic by the right to “distract from their own anti-Semitism”.

Going further back, any neologism attacking the political assumptions of the centre-left can expect to have been picked, with others like ‘Gutmensch‘ (a very politically correct person), ‘Lugenpresse‘ (liar journalists), and ‘Corona-Diktatur‘ (coronavirus dictatorship) all making the cut in past years.