Linguistic creativity sounds like a big word—like literature, poetry, or the pointed speeches of politicians. But sometimes it shows up in completely unexpected places. Giovanni Trapattoni provided a famous example. In 1998, as coach of FC Bayern Munich, he held a memorable press conference. He concluded it with the sentence: “Ich habe fertig.” (roughly: “I have done.”)
This sentence isn't grammatical. It should actually be: “Ich bin fertig.” (in English: “I am done.”) But Trapattoni, a native Italian speaker, chose this unusual form in German. Riled up by his emotions, Trapattoni let his native language take a front seat in a fascinating way, influencing the manner in which he expressed himself in a non-native language. He used iconic expressions, such as in the famous phrase “wie eine Flasche leer” (like an empty bottle), in which he creatively combined aspects of Italian with his second language, German – and thus summed up exactly what had made him so angry in a highly emotional way. That's what makes this so exciting: the statement was novel and original – and yet successful. People immediately understood what Trapattoni meant. And lo and behold: the expression stuck. At first, journalists and fans picked it up and used it as an implicit reference to the iconic speech, but over time it developed more and more into a term in its own right. Today, “Ich habe fertig” is a common and almost conventional expression, even finding its way into serious media.
This example illustrates language change in real time: what was once creative, strange, and difficult to understand can become conventional over time. It also illustrates what we as language researchers understand by linguistic creativity: an utterance is creative if it is new and original, but still functions in such a way that others can understand and accept it. And language thrives on this. The flexibility of our language and our ability to understand new and unfamiliar things allow us to communicate efficiently.
This is an exciting challenge for linguistics. How can linguistic creativity be researched? And how can we understand how it arises, what linguistic form it takes, and in what ways we as humans are creative in the first place?
This is where citizen science comes in. We encounter linguistic creativity not only in literature or at press conferences, but everywhere in everyday life: in conversations with friends, on social media, in jokes or proverbs. If we want to understand how language changes, we won't find all the answers in the lab. We thus need people to share their observations, participate in experiments, or contribute their own examples of creative language.
Just as Trapattoni's sentence became an integral part of the German language, thanks to the many people who picked it up, research into linguistic creativity also depends on participation. That's exactly what our citizen science platform is for: we want to discover the creative sides of language together with you!