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The article reveals the role of a foreign language / languages in the context of linguistic globalization and multiculturalism. The research featured the current attitude of German society to foreign languages and cultures. The authors believe that there is no contradiction between the modern multilingualism requirements and the promotion of German in the European community as a wholesome and stable language. As borders between languages become transparent, the development of linguistic consciousness acquires a special role. The research objective was to identify the motives behind borrowing that result from the needs of modern European community. The authors also explained the cases of incomplete or impossible assimilation of borrowings in German. They revealed some characteristics of English borrowings in German. For instance, hyphenation refers to the spelling of nouns borrowed from English. English verbs acquire German forms of weak verbs and their conjugation endings. Most borrowed nouns proved to have an unstable grammatical gender, while some of them are likened to German nouns and receive inflections. The syntagmatics of English adjectives is determined by English phonetics. The authors believe that the study of linguistic globalization will be useful to those interested in the development of European languages.