völkisch

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English[edit]

English Wikipedia has an article on:
Wikipedia

Etymology[edit]

German völkisch. (Morphologically, compare English folkish.)

Adjective[edit]

völkisch

  1. Pertaining to a German populist, identity-nationalist or ethnonationalist ideology found since the late 19th century.
    • 2023 June 26, Kate Connolly, “Far-right AfD wins local election in ‘watershed moment’ for German politics”, in The Guardian[1], →ISSN:
      It is led by Björn Höcke, who is considered to be part of the AfD’s far right or völkisch wing, which was officially disbanded but is still widely believed to exist.

German[edit]

Etymology[edit]

Volk +‎ -isch (initially sometimes spelled without an umlaut, as volkisch and e.g. volckisch),[1] initially as a translation of Latin popularis[2] and then of French national/New Latin nationalis. Morphologically, compare English folkish, Old English folcisc.

Pronunciation[edit]

  • IPA(key): /ˈfœlkɪʃ/
  • (file)

Adjective[edit]

völkisch (strong nominative masculine singular völkischer, comparative völkischer, superlative am völkischsten)

  1. (rare, now dated, relational) pertaining to a people [since the 15th–16th c.]
  2. (dated) national
    Synonym: national (see also staatlich, innerstaatlich)
  3. (dated, especially in white supremacy and Nazism) ethnic, pertaining to a people (especially the German people) as a (putative) race (compare ethnisch)
  4. (by extension) populist, nationalist, ethnonationalist

Usage notes[edit]

The word often has a negative connotation now because of its propaganda usage in Nazi Germany, in which the meaning shifted from earlier “national” to “ethnic”.

Declension[edit]

Derived terms[edit]

References[edit]

  1. ^ Attested with an umlaut since at least 1812 in Bragur, and also used in an 1811 letter by Fichte printed in Johann Gottlieb Fichte's Leben und literarischer Briefwechsel (1862).
  2. ^ E.g. (as volckisch) in Lorenz Diefenbach's 1857 Glossarium Latino-Germanicum mediae et infimae aetatis.

Further reading[edit]