“The curious case of wegen”
Hello everyone,
day two of our Advent Calendar.
And today will certainly a bit controversial, because we’ll talk about one of the most classic points of debate about German grammar: the question of
Which case do we need with wegen?
Or actually, it is more that I’ll give you my opinion about it :).
You see, every now and then, I get a comment from one of you guys asking me about an example where I used wegen with the Dative instead of the Genitive. And it makes perfect sense that you ask because most learning material and also a fair number of sources for native speakers claim the following:
Genitive is the proper case.
Dative is wrong or at least colloquial and not to be written.
So why do I keep using the Dative? I mean, I should teach correct German, right?
Yes, absolutely. The thing is, pardon my French, je m’appelle Emanuel et je veux t’embr… oh wait, that’s actual French. What I meant to say was this in my opinion, this rule is crap.
And the reason is… reality.
- wegen dem Regen (Dative)
- wegen des Regens (Genitive)
I think you’ll have to spend quite some time looking until you find someone who actually uses version two in daily life.
Now you might like:
“But Emanuel, rules are important to keep a language consistent and just because lot of people do something a certain way, doesn’t make it right.”
Well, that is true for almost everything, but not for language. Language is maybe the most democratic thing on the planet. It IS what the majority does. Like.. the aliens that landed in Bielefeld a while back to if aliens landed in, say, Bielefeld and where to objectively study the German as it is spoken and written without checking rule books, it’s likely that they’d say something like
“What the hell is this crap. This verb at the end stuff is so confusing”
Seriously though, many sources do acknowledge that wegen is used with Dative in colloquial language.
But my REAL argument comes now:
- Wegen dir bin ich zu spät.
I don’t think any of the wegen-with-genitive-acolytes, that so readily point out that “wegen dem Regen” is wrong, would even notice what happened in this sentence. Wegen is used with Dative. And NO ONE would EVER say that with Genitive.
- Wegen deiner bin ich zu spät… NOPE
That sounds like from a theater play.
So either, we need a rule like this: “Wegen is used with Genitive, except when we use it with a personal pronoun, then it comes with Dative.”
Or we just accept that either version is fine.Live and let live, so to speak.
Me personally, I’m for the latter, and I am pretty sure that you will encounter plenty of wegens with Dative if you come to Germany.
Now, I might have managed to convince you (not sure), but what about your teacher, who insists that it’s Genitive because ruuuules.
Well, no problem. There’s one Podcast called Belle Lettre and they guy makes a REALLY compelling case that not only is Dative not wrong, Dative is actually the PROPER case for wegen and Genitive is but a concoction of scholars who don’t know what they’re saying.
The guy has like level 100 in linguistics and level 200 in etymology (I’m like 10/15) so ALLY knows what he is talking about.
The video is 45 minutes long, the text can be read a bit more quickly. Here’s the link:
Belle Lettres – “wegen” with Genitive or Dative
(nerd level 10)
Now, the video is 45 minutes long (the text is a bit shorter) and it’s all in German, so you have to have a high nerd level to check this out.
But because it’s Advent I’ll summarize it for you real quick :). Here are his main points:
- “real” prepositions ONLY come with Dative or Accusative, only adverbs used as prepositions come with Genitive
- “wegen” is based on an old norther German meaning of “Weg” as “point”, we can see it in “always = at every point”
- this meaning was unknown in the South of Germany
- they used the phrasing as a translation for a Latin preposition without being aware that it was based on a noun, which makes it a “real” preposition
- the words like “meinetwegen”, “seinetwegen” and so on, often taken to be a Genitive are actually a Dative because they’re a shortened form of “von meinen Wegen”. The “t” is filler. Luther, the bible guy, used to still write meinentwegen, quite clearly showing the Dative
These are really just the main points. I mean, the video is 45 minutes, as I said. And of course that doesn’t mean that what he says is the end all be all.
But obviously a strong case can be made for wegen actually, by nature being a Dative preposition, so I think the easiest is just to … not worry about it. I mean, unless you’re a journalist ;).
And that’s it for today. What about you? Have you heard Dative with wegen? Have you ever been corrected? Can you follow my line of argument?
Let me know your thoughts in the comments.
Have a great day, and bis morgen :).
Oh, if you want to nerd out even more, here’s a scientific article about it… also in German:
Wegen – Dative or Genitive – A corpus based approach (pdf)
Some examples:
- “Warum hast du so schlechte Laune?”
“Wegen dir.” (Dativ) - “Why are you in such a bad mood?”
“Because of you!”
(NO ONE would ever used Genitive here. Not even you German teacher!)
- “Warum hast du so schlecht Laune?”
“Wegen deiner/deinen Haaren.” - Why are you in such a bad mood?”
“Because of your hair.”
(both versions sound good)
Duolingo seems to be using both with wegen – in fact I arrived here in hot pursuit of why ‚den‘ was suddenly the genitive article for plurals…
I am wondering if in general the German genitive/dative situation is similar to ‚‘of’ versus apostrophe s in English ? Eg. ‚the knees of the bee‘ versus ‚the bee’s knees’ ?
In terms of possession you mean?
There is a parallel, yes
– das Nest von dem Vogel (the nest of the bird, von+Dative)
– das Nest des Vogels (the bird’s nest, Genitive)
Both sound okay and the latter sound more high register and can sound formal.
Is that what you meant?
Yes, but the other way round with with apostrope-s the everyday one, You would never say ‘the paws of the dog are dirty’ but rather ‘the dog‘s paws are dirty‘. Or if you did, it would mean that dirtiness was a congenital property of dog‘s paws. Which it is, of course …
Actually, this is an interesting example because we have 4 options in German:
– Des Hundes Pfoten… pure genitive, sounds archaic or theatrical
– die Pfoten des Hundes … genitive, sounds formal
– die Pfoten von dem Hund… Dative, colloquial
– die Hundepfoten … might be the easiest choice :)
And then there are regional variants like this:
– dem Hund seine Pfoten… this is super colloquial though.
hahaha, You are the ”der Bäcker” guy from Anja Winter’s vid. Man I didnt realize you are such a col guy with a cool blog like this. the Genitive or Dative meme is hilarious, thanks for the laugh and also the detail explaination too.
Yeah, that’s me :).
I think I am in a B1 clip as well, as some sort of perv inspector. At least we filmed it. Glad you enjoy my stuff.
Is it the same for some other prep like inklusive? Or is inklusive still used with genitive and then dative when there’s a personal pronoun? Inklusive der Sonne. Inklusive mir.
“inklusive” with things is much more common with Genetive, but with people, you’re indeed likely to hear “inklusive mir, dir, ihm” and not “meiner, deiner, seiner”. In fact, the latter is so rare that it sounds theatrical.
This does depend on the preposition though, it’s not a general rule.
Hi Emanuel, I have emailed you today regarding a sponsored subscription. Does processing take long?
Up to week. I don’t do these emails on the daily.
I’ve been studying German for four months now and my opinion is… hold onto everything old school. It’s a matter of identity. I’m using Duolingo as one of my sources, and truly i can’t imagine that the first choice of transalation of Freund would always be Boyfriend. And surely people in Germany would say Lieferdienst and not Lieferservice as Duolingo suggests. If i ever go to Germany I will be rigorously faithful to the genitive.when indicating possession and with prepositions.
I’m curious if someone actually corrects you when you do it super strictly.
Part of the point of this post (and especially the source I linked) is that the idea that Genitive is the “true” preposition for “wegen” is a myth.
So you may well be following a rule that some conservative scholars made up and that was never a description of the actual language.
Oh, as for Lieferdienst and Lieferservice… Lieferdienst is what I’d use to refer to a company that does deliveries as their business. “Lieferservice” is what I would use to describe the service offered by a business (like a supermarket offering deliveries). But that’s NOT a fixed distinction, so other people might use it differently.
Once again i’m speaking as an outsider, but do not give up too easily what my one website (germanwithlaura.com) referred to as German’s ‘depth of grammatical character’. I say avoid any English word as it were the plague. The other day on Duolingo i was asked to translate information… I consulted with Google Translate and I decided upon ‘Angaben’
What many people misunderstand about German taking in English words is that it actually makes German a richer, more precise language. It’s usually not the case that an English words comes and pushes out a German one. What really happens is that an English word comes, gets used in a certain context primarily and the German counterparts stops being used in that context but is STILL used in other contexts.
So at the end of this, you have TWO words that are used in different situations and have different tones and connotations.
I think that’s a win, not a loss.
My go to example for this is “fresh”. German has “frisch”, and by now, there’s a pretty clear distinction in my mind when I would use one or the other. So it’s two words where before there was only one.
“Information” is not a good example, because all languages imported that from Latin. “Angaben” only works if the context is “information supplied upon (implied) request”. It’ll sounds wrong in a lot of other contexts.
I would advise you to not be too strict about this, especially if this includes Latin based vocabulary. It does not make your German any better. Chances are, you’ll end up using a bunch of words completely wrong.
No idea what Laura means with “depth of grammatical character”, but it sounds nice. I don’t think this is threatened in any way though.
I find the explanation from Belle Lettres quite interesting, because a similar argument exists for the genitive. In the Etymologie section of the DWDS entry for wegen, they list this example:
verkürzt aus mhd. von … wegen ‘von … Seiten’ (mit eingeschlossenem Genitiv, mhd. von unser beider wegen, 13. Jh.), daher eigentlich Dativ Plur. von mhd. wec ‘Weg’ in der Bedeutung md. mnd. ‘Ort, Stelle, Seite’.
Here, the genitive pronoun is unambiguous. In this sense, one would have said von unser Wegen, which would then have turned into unseretwegen/unsertwegen.
As for meinetwegen, in Old High German the original form of the genitive pronoun meiner was mīn. Due to sound changes, over time mīn became mein, which later turned into modern-day meiner. The archaic genitive form mein is fossilized in the name of the flower Vergissmeinnicht, way back when vergessen still ruled the genitive. Then, von mein Wegen (if you look in really old texts, you can find it) is actually a phrase using the archaic genitive pronoun mein, and eventually became meinetwegen.
The pattern “von + [pronoun or noun in genitive] + Wegen” explains why today, it’s still possible to write des Kindes wegen, because historically, one would have said von des Kindes Wegen.
However, the existence of von meinen Wegen and the corresponding dative argument is intriguing. Perhaps wegen has always ruled both genitive and dative?
Ultimately though, this is purely an academic exercise. Not even the most strict among the grammar police would go out onto the street and say: vergiss meiner nicht, ich brauch deiner, ich warte deiner, es erinnert mich deiner, ich denk deiner, ich fürchte mich des Lebens ohne deiner. So they’ve already acknowledged that grammatical constructions can change & just have to get over the fact that wegen dir is also correct :)
Wow, you did quite the deep dive. Interesting thoughts, and I absolutely agree with your conclusion :)
Very cool article. I was just looking at the Duden entry and in the grammar section it lists a variety of different possible Dativ sentence structures as “Mündlich standardsprachlich” i.e. not even considerd umgangsprachlich. So according to Duden its totally legit to use Dativ. Not sure if that is a recent change or not. I also only ever learnt it was genitiv so this was a surprise.
Ah, nice to know!!
It might be a recent change (recent being like the last decade), but I’m not sure. I find the Duden website super inconvenient to use so I never go there.
But it’s good they write what they write about it. Now team Genitive can’t really point to Duden anymore to defend their claim :)
Out of curiosity what do you use instead of Duden?
Uhm… nothing really. If I have a spelling question I usually type in “[spelling a] oder [spelling b]” and I’ll then end up on korrekturen.de or rechtschreibtipps or something like that. On occasion, I do go to Duden, too. But I find their UX abysmal. I have to scroll and click too many times between typing in a search and getting any relevant information.
Could anyone please explain to me the different meanings of “erwürgen”. When I listen to German sacred choral works from the 18th and 19th centuries, erwürgen is always translated as “slain” (or “to slay”). When I look up this word in modern German dictionaries, it’s translated as “to strangle”. Is the first meaning from the 16th Century Luther Bible? Do you know how the meaning evolved over the centuries?
Also, I have a question about “grüssen”. In Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, he uses the phrase “Gegrüsset seist du, Rabbi”. But several times in Wagner’s operas he uses the phrase “Sei dir (mir) gegrüsst!”. Is this just poetic and archaic, because I never see these constructions in modern German.
I just checked the etymological dictionary and there, it says that “würgen” always had a notion of breathlessness (it’s related to English worry, btw).
There was no specific mention of the Bible or of a more general sense as “to slay”
As for “sei mir gegrüßt”… it is a bit high brow but it’s actually still in use, at least by older people.
“gegrüßet seist du” however, does sound a bit archaic to me.
Im 21 Jahrhundert wird oft gesagt-
“Atemlos” -durch- die Nacht”!
So sind die Leute heute!
Von wegen! No idea if this has any dative connection due to the dative ‘von’ but I like the phrasing either way (it doesn’t represent my personal response to your claim about how wegen should be used ;)
For those who don’t know it –
It was actually part of last year’s calendar :)
https://yourdailygerman.com/von-wegen-meaning/
The entry for ‘wegens’ in my small-ish Collins Dictionary says ‘because of…’ +Gen or Dat (col). Enough said . Thank you for your lovely helpful notes.
Go Collins!!
Funnily enough, in Czech it is the other way round!
It is correct to use the equivalent of wegen (“kvůli”) with Dative, although people use it with Genitive, too. I’m actually not so sure how big a mistake it is, I haven’t found any articles dealing with it, but it sounds super natural to me.
The reason Genitive works in Czech is that the origin of the word literally means “to the will (of)” – naturally followed by Genitive.
The reason the Dative works is because in the structure “I do something to somebody’s will”, the ‘somebody’ would be in Dative.
And yes, I realize this is completely useless information :P
Do you get corrected by other people when you use Genitive? Or is it pretty much “Say whatever you want.”
This is one of those areas that’s just weird for a foreigner. I definitely hear plenty of “wegen dem” (also “während dem”) in normal conversation, casual everyday settings, etc., and I tend to try to just conform to that in those settings.
But I think there’s always a sort of subtle mental pressure as a foreigner that you put on yourself, not exactly to conform to the rules as you learned them in school, but to show that you learned them and have a desire to speak well. It seems to me that an awful lot of Germans will use the dative where they “should” use genitive without a second thought, but they appreciate “correct” use of the genitive because it sounds elegant. It might be totally out of place in normal conversation, but it’s sort of like the heirloom crystal dishes in the china cabinet – you don’t want to get them out to eat your microwave burrito off of, but you wouldn’t want to throw them away either, even if there are only ever one or two occasions in your life when they’re actually put to use.
For me, there’s the added wrinkle of speaking in different settings/registers. I obviously want to speak “normal” German with most of my friends and acquaintances, especially students and other people younger than I am. But I also preach, which (even in a pretty casual Freikirche setting) is public speaking to a mixed audience, so there I want to sound normal but also have good style that doesn’t put off older or more highly educated people. Then I’m also an instructor in a seminary, which is not a university, so it’s less formal in atmosphere, but is still an academic setting where I want to be able to put things precisely and fit style-wise into what students are reading and hearing. (I’ve also got colleagues who tend to speak more formally/elegantly, so there’s some degree of peer pressure there too.)
I doubt most people would tend to hold non-native speakers to that high a standard (although I have run into one or two who did), but it’s kind of grating to think of people noticing a particular usage and thinking, “well, he just doesn’t know any better.” Oh well.
Wow, so much trouble :). I was thinking whether there’s a similar instance in English for me, but the only one that came to my mind was “It was me, who did X” vs “it was I who did X”.
I am pretty aware of this one so I technically could do it right on the fly, but I never do it, because I feel like I would sound pretentious. Or maybe teacher’s pet is the better word. Like… “Look, how well I studied. Look, look.”
In a way, I feel like it wouldn’t be authentic because I don’t give a damn about stuff like that in my own language either. #qualifiedteacher
It’s kind of the same as with swearing, actually.
Whenever I catch myself using the f-word or “like” a bit too much just because I’m trying to emulate speech I heard on Youtube, I stop myself
But then again, I bet if I had to preach in front of a mixed American audience I would say “It was I who sinned.”… well, maybe not that sentence but yeah :).
But talking in different registers is quite an advanced thing to do. As a beginner, I think it’s more important to speak somewhat quickly than uber correct. No one cares if you got the Genitive right if it takes you a minute to finish each sentence.
Wegen des Wetters bin ich den ganzen Tag zu Hause geblieben.
wegen Ihres Kurs über das Wort wegen bedanke mich bei Ihnen.
Kleine Korrektur:
Das ist ein super Beispiel, denn hier würde fast jeder “wegen ihrem Kurs” sagen. ist einfach viel einfacher und klingt besser.
Emanuel…. tell us more about other genitives like trotz and während if possible. Do they behave the same as wegen?
Good question. For me personally, I think I tend to use Genitive with “während” and especially for “trotz”. So I would say
However, I think the main reason for that one is that I want to avoid confusion with the word “trotzdem” which is as Dative as it can get. Another indicator that using Dativ is an old thing.
In England war’s immer Nom Akk Gen Dat. Das war aus dem Latein.
Hab’ grad mal auf Wikipedia geguckt, und die benutzen in der Deutschen Version beim Eintrag für die Deutsche Deklination auch Nom Akk Gen Dat…
*that moment when I stopped caring :D
Mmm very good. As a tour guide , years ago, an elderly lady on the coach said to me .. Bleiben Sie nicht wegen meines…. she wasn’t going to get off, she was too tired. Never heard meinetwegen etc tho
“wegen meines”? Wow, now that actually does sound wrong. A proper genitive would be
Maybe some dialect.
Es freut mich sehr,den diesjährigen Adventskalender beginnen zu können. Danke dir für deine Bemühungen!
Sehr gerne :)
To the team and people who have paid in advance for other users, THANK U SO MUCH. With Ur support I am able to learn German from this amazing website. ONCE AGAIN THANK YOU SO MUCH.
Emanuel, vielleicht off topic, aber mich interessiert, warum einige Lehrer nicht “Nominativ-Genitiv-Dativ-Akkusativ” sondern “Nominativ-Akkusativ-Dativ-Genitiv” verwenden? Ich sehe die Logik nicht und verwirrt mich das beim lernen. Kannst du mich erleuchten, wenn wir schon den ersten Advent haben? :) Danke!
No-Ge-Da-Akk… das ist die Reihenfolge, mit der wir Muttersprachler das in der Schule lernen. Ich denke mal, das kommt aus Latein.
Aber Nominativ und Akkusativ sind sehr ähnlich und Genitiv brauch man am wenigsten. Deshalb wird das für Deutschlerner oft umgedreht.
Ich fand das auch komisch, aber wenn man sich die Tabellen anguckt, dann macht das Sinn.
The be-all and end-all
‚ And of course that doesn’t mean that what he says is the end all be all.‘
Emanuel, wenn Sie mir eine kleine Korrektion zu Ihrem fast makellosen Englisch gestatten würden, darf ich Ihnen hinweisen dass der richtige Ausdruck nicht ‘the end all be all’ sondern ‘the be-all and end-all‘ ist?
Korrekturen sehr gerne :). Aber ich finde bei Google 1 Million Treffer für End All Be All. Sicher, dass das nicht auch idiomatisch ist?
The phrase is definitely “the be-all and end-all.” Since the days of Shakespeare (Macbeth), and still in common use today. :) Thank you for the interesting article!