As an English language teacher, you will be familiar with the agonies of having to teach irregular spellings and compound nouns. But imagine how teachers in Germany feel, now that several thousand words have been added to their mother tongue.

The words added include many from the English-speaking world such as “eine After-show-party” and “das It-girl”. The word “Ehrenmord”, meaning honour killing, has also been added to the latest edition of the Duden dictionary - the German equivalent of our Oxford English Dictionary - which was published earlier this month.

A large number of the 5,000 added words are inspired by the recession. Words such as “die Kreditklemme” (credit crunch) are a sign of the times. Fans of social networking can now even officially “twittern”, which means to post on Twitter.