[ugh]

Can we please kill that stupid “X has no word for Y!” snowclone? Please? (Or at least get people to do some basic research before they say something stupid like that.)

As some light googling will reveal (or thinking for a few seconds, if you are, like me, a native German speaker), German does indeed have a word for small talk. There is „Plausch” (that’s the noun) and “plaudern” (and the verb). I suspect that there are also a few other words in regional dialects. („Schwätzchen”, maybe.) There is also „Tratsch“ but that’s more along the lines of gossip and usually between two people who know each other.

I do suspect that small talk is rarer in Germany but I would like to see a quantitative study confirming that, not (what seems like) idle speculation from a Professor who doesn’t even know that her own language has a word for small talk.

[Typhon]

On one hand, I want to say you should read the thread before posting, on the other hand, if someone reaches the same conclusions independently from the rest, it decreases the likelihood that we're all insane.

[ugh]

I did read the thread but only after my comment was already written. I feel kinda bad about posting but I didn’t want to throw the comment away. (I searched the thread for “small talk” before I started writing and didn’t find anything because everybody who decided to write about German and small talk seems to have decided to write “smalltalk”.)