There are a few things that those of us who’ve spent some years acquiring a language realise as we go along. For example, that it’s the everyday things that are usually more difficult to describe than complex political issues: after all, democracy in English gives you démocratie in French, democracia in Spanish and Demokratie in German. But just you try telling a plumber that the seal on the drainpipe below your sink needs changing, along with the washers. That’s when you learn that the German word for rubber seal or gasket is identical to the word for poetry (Dichtung) and that the translation of washer is literally “Mother slice” (Mutterscheibe).

So knowledge of a language is not hierarchical, which also means that swearing convincingly is far more difficult than one might imagine. Swearing belongs to slang, and slang, whilst being amongst the first things that children learn as they acquire their native tongue, is about the last thing you pick up as a later learner. After all, slang – and especially foul language – varies far more between languages than high-level tomes and academic registers, and you won’t find much about swearing in your standard issue textbooks, either.

So you know you’ve really got a grip of language when you can swear like the locals; and in Germany, swearing like a German means, for a start, forgetting the whole English-speaking obsession with the f-word, going a bit more faecal, and – interestingly enough – swearing less. Even very crude spoken German contains less obvious swear-words than English, where you eff eff every effing way, for eff’’s sake: German can’t handle that level of cursing. Sure enough, you can attach Scheiß- and Arsch- elegantly enough onto several words in one sentence, but it’s still somewhat tame compared to English.

Does this mean that Germans don’t have an equivalent to London pub-talk with its liberal peppering of the f- and c-words? Or a match for New York American’s casual swearing? Or for the crudest variants of Afro-American speech, now so widespread thanks to hip-hop culture?

Hell no! Just like every other language on earth, German has its ways of aggressively asserting one’s identity as a speaker of slang. It’s simply that the markers of low-register German just happen to not be as obviously offensive at first glance as their English equivalents.

Photo: malik_braun (Flickr)

Take the word Alter, for example. It’s not strictly a “swearword”, but if you say it enough, it will have the desired effect: grannies will groan, mothers will moan and human resources directors will not employ. Most basically, Alter means “old” as in ein alter Mann, an old man; der Alte means, by extension, my father (similar to the Cockney English “me old man”) and die Alte is my mother or my wife (i.e. the old dear).

Yet Alter said between men also covers friendship. Where Londoners say “mate”, Americans say “dude” and Afro-Caribbean English takes “brother”, lads in Germans say “Alter: Moin!” or “Was geht’n Alter?” would be a rough translation for a friendly “Alright mate!?” or “Yo, brotha”. In a further similarity to “mate”, Alter lends itself to overuse, especially added onto the end of sentences: “Komm rein, Alter. Erzähl mal, Alter, wie geht’s dir denn?” – “Hello mate, come in and tell me how you’re doin’, mate.”

This is where the similarity ends, though. There’s the Alter that crops up in the middle of the sentence, usually as phatic utterance where English tends to rely on “like”: “Dann geh’ ich rein, Alter, und seh’ die da, Alter” – “So I goes in, like, and she’s, like, there.”

There’s also the Alter of surprise, usually just a single word as a reply to an unbelievable fact (low register London English generally tends to take “Bugger me!” or worse). There’s also the Alter of desperation, added onto the end of a plea for something: “Worauf warten wir denn, Alter?” – “So what the hell are we waiting for?” Moreover, it sometimes crops up as a single word of sheer frustration, like when train doors close just as you reach the platform, sweating and panting.

Photo: tbee (Flickr)

So, really, it’s an all-rounder, the word you use when all other words fail you – or when you simply can’t be bothered to try and find them. Unlike the English or American relationship to swearwords, however, the German relationship to Alter is relaxed. You’ll occasionally hear it in offices, or in other variations that older people, too, often use (one is, inexplicably, Alter Schwede! or “old Swede”, an expression of surprise). Nevertheless, the continuous use of Alter in all its permutations remains a sure mark of very low-register speech and one that is, believe you me, hard enough to learn, but even harder to unlearn.

As luck would have it, though, I’m a freelancer who doesn’t need to watch his mouth in an interview situation, and whose mother doesn’t speak anywhere near enough German to get angry.