American Language (122 page)

The so-called Pennsylvania-Dutch area of Pennsylvania and Maryland covers about 17,500 square miles. It began to be invaded by Germans before the end of the Seventeenth Century, and by 1775 nearly 90,000 had come in. They came “almost exclusively from Southwestern Germany (the Palatinate, Baden, Alsace, Württemberg, Hesse), Saxony, Silesia and Switzerland,”
¹
with the Palatines predominating. Pennsylvania-Dutch is based mainly upon the Westricher dialect of the Palatinate, and in the course of two centuries has become extraordinarily homogeneous. In the heart of its homeland, in Lehigh, Berks and Lebanon counties, Pennsylvania, between 60% and 65% of the total inhabitants can speak it, and between 30% and 35% use it constantly.
²
The fact that it has survived the competition of English for so many years is due mainly to the extreme clannishness of the people speaking it — a clannishness based principally upon religious separatism. This theological prepossession has colored their somewhat scanty literature, and most of the books they have produced have been of pious tendency. They printed the Bible three times before ever it was printed in English in America.
³
Their language was called
Dutch
by their English and Scotch-Irish neighbors because the early immigrants themselves called it
Deitsch
(H. Ger.
Deutsch
), and not because they were mistaken for Hollanders. To this day their descendants frequently use
Pennsylvania-Dutch
instead of
-German
in speaking of it. It has been studied at length by competent native philologians.
⁴

Like the English of the Appalachian highlands, it includes a large number of archaisms, both in vocabulary and in pronunciation. The old German short vowel is retained in many words which have a long vowel or a diphthong in modern German,
e.g., nemme
(neh-men),
giwwel
(giebel),
hiwwel
(hübel),
votter
(vater),
huddle
(hudeln). In other cases an earlier diphthong is substituted for a later one,
e.g., meis
(mäuse),
leit
(leute),
Moi
(Mai). In yet others a long vowel takes the place of a diphthong,
e.g., bees
(böse),
aach
(auch),
kleen
(klein), or a neutral
e
is substituted,
e.g., bem
(bäume). When consonants come together in German, one of them is often dropped,
e.g., kopp
(kopf),
kinner
(kinder). In loan-words from English
st
often takes the sound of the German
scht
, and there is confusion between
t
and
d, b
and
W
, p
and
b, s
and z. But a number of the characters of the underlying Westricher dialect have disappeared. “Von dem Verwandeln des
d
und
t
in
r
,” says the Rev. Heinrich Harbaugh,
⁵
“und dem Verschmelzen des
d
und
t
nach
l
in
ll
, wie
laden
in
lare, gewitter
in
gewirrer, halten
in
halle, mild
in
mill
, findet man im Pennsylvanisch-Deutschen kaum eine Spur.” He also says that the final
-en
is seldom dropped, though its
n
may be reduced to “einen Nasenlaut.” The percentage of English loan-words in use is estimated by Lambert to run from “
nil
to 12% or 15%, depending upon the writer or speaker and the subject.” Harbaugh gives many examples,
e.g., affis
(office),
beseid
(beside),
bisness
(business),
boghie
(buggy),
bortsch
(porch),
bresent
(present),
cumpaunde
(compound),
diehlings
(dealings),
dschillt
(chilled),
dschuryman
(juryman),
ebaut
(about),
ennihau
(anyhow),
fäct
(fact),
fäschin
(fashion),
fens
(fence),
gut-bei
(good-bye),
heist
(hoist),
humbuk
(humbug),
käsch
(cash),
krick
(creek),
ledscher-buch
(ledger-book),
lohnsom
(lonesome),
lof-letter
(love-letter),
nau
(now),
rehs
(race),
schkippe
(skip),
schtärt
(start),
tornpeik
(turnpike),
wälli
(valley),
weri
(very) and
’xäktly
(exactly). The pronunciation of
creek
and
hoist
will be noted; in the same way
sleek
becomes
schlick
. Many English verbal adjectives are inflected in the German manner, e.g.,
gepliehst
(pleased),
g’rescht
(arrested),
gedscheest
(chased),
gebärrt
(barred),
vermisst
(missed) and
ver-schwapped
(swapped). An illuminating brief specimen of the language is to be found in the sub-title of E. H. Rauch’s “Pennsylvania Dutch Hand-book”:
⁶
“En booch for inschtructa.” Here we see the German indefinite article decayed to
en
, the vowel of
buch
made to conform to English usage,
für
abandoned for
for
, and a purely English word,
instruction
, boldly adopted and naturalized. Some astounding examples of Pennsylvania-German are to be found in the humorous literature of the dialect,
e.g.
, “Mein
stallion
hat über die
fenz geschumpt
und dem nachbar sein
whiet
abscheulich
gedämätscht
” and “Ick muss den gaul
anharnessen
und den
boghie greasen
befor wir ein
ride
nemmen.” Such phrases as “Es giebt gar kein
use
” and “Ick kann es nicht
ständen
” are very common. But the dialect is also capable of more or less dignified literary use, and the Pastor Harbaugh before-mentioned (1817–67) printed many poems in it, some of them not a little charming. Here are the first and last stanzas of his most celebrated effort, “Das Alt Schulhaus an der Krick”:

Of late, with improvements in communication, the dialect shows signs of gradually disappearing. So recently as the 80’s of the last century, two hundred years after the coming of the first German settlers, there were thousands of their descendants in Pennsylvania who could not speak English at all, but now the younger Pennsylvania-Germans learn it in school, read English newspapers, and begin to forget their native patois. An interesting, but almost extinct variant of it, remaining much closer to the original Westricher dialect, is to be found in the Valley of Virginia, to which German immigrants penetrated before the Revolution. In this sub-dialect the cases of the nouns do not vary in form, adjectives are seldom inflected, and only two tenses of the verbs remain, the present and the perfect,
e.g., ich geh
and
ich bin gange
. The indefinite article,
en
in Pennsylvania-German, is a simple ’
n
. The definite article has been preserved, but
das
has changed to
des
. It is declined as follows:

The only persons still speaking this Valley German are a few remote country-folk. It was investigated nearly a generation ago by H. M. Hays,
⁸
from whom I borrow the following specimen:

The Germans, since colonial days, have always constituted the largest body of people of non-British stock in the country. In 1930, despite the sharp decline in immigration, the Census Bureau found 2,188,006 foreign-born persons whose mother-tongue was German. How many persons of native birth used it as their first language was not determined, but certainly there must have been a great many,
especially in Pennsylvania and the Middle West. Outside the Pennsylvania-German area, as within it, the German spoken in the United States shows a disregard of the grammatical niceties of the Standard language and a huge accession of English loan-words. Its vagaries supply rich material for the German-American wits, and almost all of the seventeen German dailies
¹⁰
print humorous columns done in it. I offer a specimen from “Der Charlie,” a feature of the New York
Staats-Zeitung:

The same ghastly dialect provides the substance of a series of popular comic verses by Kurt M. Stein, most of them contributed to the Chicago
Tribune
or
Evening Post
. A specimen:

“Every English noun,” says Dr. Albert W. Aron of the University of Illinois, “is a potential loan-word in colloquial American German. Naturally, the great mass of borrowed words belongs to the stock vocabulary of everyday speech, but situations are easily conceivable where any English noun understood by the speaker and the listener may be used. Accordingly, every English noun may find itself returned to its pristine state of being masculine, feminine or neuter.”
¹³
But Dr. Aron’s investigation discloses that there is a tendency to
make most of them feminine. This is due, he believes, to a number of causes, among them, the fact that the German
die
sounds very much like the English
the
, the fact that
die
is the general German plural and thus suggests itself before the plural nouns,
e.g., wages, reins, pants
and
scissors
, that are so numerous in English, and the fact that in some of the German dialects spoken by German immigrants there is a tendency in the same direction. Dr. Aron’s investigation was made in the Middle West. He found some local variations in usage, but not many. Not a few loan-words, of course, remain masculine or neuter, chiefly because of the influence of their German cognates or by rhyming or other analogy. Thus, nouns signifying living beings are “practically always masculine,” in accord with “the general German principle of allowing a masculine to designate both male and female beings,” and “any loan-word ending in
-ing
is neuter if the meaning is equivalent to that of an English gerund in
-ing
,” since “all German infinitives are neuter.” But the movement toward the feminine gender is unmistakable, and to it belong many large groups of words, including all ending in
-ence, -ance, -sion
or
-tion, -y, -sure
or
-ture, -ege, -age, -ship, -hood
and
-ness
and most in
-ment
. Sometimes there is vacillation between masculine and feminine, or neuter and feminine, but never between masculine and neuter. “This,” says Dr. Aron, “is in consonance with the theory of the feminine tendency of these loan-words.”
¹⁴