Lesson 3
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Lesson 3
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Table of Contents |
Lesson 5
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THE GERMAN LANGUAGE IN AMERICA
1. Key personalities
Henry Louis Mencken (1880-1956). Journalist, editor, and literary critic born in Baltimore. Although known chiefly for his satirical and iconoclastic social criticism, his linguistic study The American Language has become a classic. The work documents the far-reaching differences between British and American vocabulary and investigates the origins of distinctly American words. H. L. Mencken was of German descent and took a considerable interest in the German-American cultural heritage. In his study of the American language he was one of the first to draw attention to the many loanwords from German that have found their way into the American vocabulary.
Albert Buffington (d. 1980). One of the first 20th-century linguists to make a systematic descriptive study of the Pennsylvania German dialect and to explore such problems as regional variation within Pennsylvania German, the influence of Pennsylvania German on the English spoken in Pennsylvania, and English loanwords in Pennsylvania German.
Preston Barba. Although he wrote about many aspects of Pennsylvania German culture, Barba is perhaps best remembered as the editor between 1935 and 1964 of "'S Pennsylfawnisch Deitsch Eck" ('The Pennsylvania German Corner'), a regular feature of the Allentown, PA Morning Call.
Carroll E. Reed. Author of a number of modern linguistic studies of Pennsylvania German, including a linguistic atlas published in 1954.
Glen G. Gilbert. The leading linguistic scholar for Texas German. His many publications include a linguistic atlas of Texas German and studies of English loan-words in the Texas German dialect.
2. Main trends
In many cases groups of German immigrants settled in such a way as to establish speech islands characterized by a distinct local dialect. The largest and best researched of these German-American speech islands is the Pennsylvania German dialect. There are textbooks, reference grammars, readers, a dialect atlas, and even Es Nei Teshtament in a bilingual edition of "Pennsylvania Deitsh un English." Dictionaries of the language have been compiled by several people, including Marcus Lambert, C. R. Rahn, M. E. Kryger, and C. Richard Beam. Scholars such as Harry Hess Reichard have written extensively on the literature of this dialect. The dialect poets John Birmelin (1873-1951) and Henry Harbaugh (1817-1867) are well known.
Another significant German speech island in the U.S. is Texas German. This speech island, centered around places such as Fredericksburg and New Braunfels in eastern Texas, has been the object of considerable research, though the dialect is by no means as fully documented as is Pennsylvania German. Two other significant German speech islands in North America are in Manitoba, Canada and at Amana, IA near Cedar Rapids. The so-called Amana German dialect is spoken in a group of several villages where members of a German religious sect settled in the 19th century. The speech island in Manitoba came into being as the result of settlement by Mennonites, members of another religious group. Smaller, more compact German speech islands are found in a number of places. At Green County, WI, a group of settlers from the Canton of Glarus, Switzerland established their Swiss dialect. A north German dialect can be found in the area around Dubuque, IA.
The most important German dialect distinction in Europe is between the Low German dialects, spoken in the north, and the Upper German dialects, spoken in the south, including Austria, Liechtenstein and German-speaking Switzerland. This distinction is clearly reflected in the German speech islands found in North America. Pennsylvania German and the Swiss German of New Glarus, WI, are both Upper German dialects, while the German at Dubuque, IA and the Mennonite dialect of Manitoba are Low German. Juergen Eichhoff has published a bibliography of sources dealing with the Low German dialects of North America.
While non-standard dialects tended to form stable speech communities in rural areas, the situation was different for the mass of German immigrants who established ethnic enclaves in American cities during the 19th and 20th centuries. Even though these immigrants were often dialect speakers who belonged to clubs and associations formed by other immigrants from the same home region in Europe, they found standard or High German to be useful as a common language of the German immigrant neighborhood as a whole. This has been particularly true of middle-class immigrants of recent years, who have often been speakers of standard German without much knowledge of one of the many regional dialects.
The American linguist Leonard Bloomfield pointed out in his book Language (1933) that any immigrant community which maintains its own language will inevitably borrow words from the surrounding language of the linguistic majority. The Norwegian-American linguist Einar Haugen has made a general survey of such immigrant speech communities in the U.S. A Finnish scholar, Paivi Kaivola, has made a particular study of the influence of English on the German speech of German immigrants in America. A German scholar, Helga Wacker, has investigated the peculiarities of German written usage in America.
There are, of course, many German place names in America. In one recent study La Vern J. Rippley and Rainer Schmeisser documented the existence of more than a hundred such place names in the state of Minnesota, which approximately matches Eberhard Reichmann's count for Indiana. George Fenwick Jones' dictionary of German-American Names has some 15,000 entries. In many cases, of course, the German origin has been obscured by anglicization. Thus, many people in the U.S. who have the name Miller and Smith are descended from ancestors whose names were originally Mueller and Schmidt/Schmied.
German has had a considerable impact on the English language as it is spoken in the U.S. Many common American expressions turn out to be of German origin. "Hold on" in the sense of "wait a minute" is from German "halt an." "Fresh" in the sense of "impudent" is from German "frech." The names of many German foods and beverages have, of course, found their way into English. The list includes hamburger, frankfurter, sauerkraut, pumpernickel and Pilsner, to give only a few examples. H. L. Mencken appears to have been the first to point out that German words such as "Oktoberfest" have given rise to distinctly American coinages such as "swatfest," meaning a series of hits in a baseball game.
An Indiana hospital even had a "Krankenhausfest."
Since World War II American English has begun to have a prodigious influence on several European languages, including German. The German scholar Hans Galinsky has made a particular attempt to study the encroachment of Americanisms on contemporary German usage. Some of the English expressions that have recently found their way into German are designer, equipment, singles, fitness training, and recycling. Computer-related terminology is largely English. The expression "Seifenoper" is apparently a loan translation of the American "soap opera." In some cases well-established German expressions appear to be threatened by recently borrowed Americanisms. Thus, "Information" appears to be replacing "Auskunft."
3. Suggested further reading
Joshua A. Fishman, ed. Language Loyalty in the United States. The Hague: Mouton, 1966.
John William Frey. Pennsylvania Dutch Grammar. Lancaster, PA: John Beers and Son, 1981.
Glen G. Gilbert. The German Language in America. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1971.
Earl C. Haag. A Pennsylvania German Reader and Grammar. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 1982.
Einar Haugen. Bilingualism in the Americas: A Research and Bibliographical Guide. University, Alabama: Univ. of Alabama Press, 1956.
George Fenwick Jones. German-American Names. Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Company, 1990.
Heinz Kloss. Deutsch als Muttersprache in den Vereinigten Staaten. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1979-1985 (2 vols.).
H. L. Mencken. The American Language. New York: Knopf, 4th ed., 1960.
Salmons, Joseph C. The German Language in America, 1683-1991.
Madison: Max Kade Institute for German-American Studies, Univ. of Wisconsin, 1993.
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Created: 4 August 1998, SEL Updated: 17 November 2007, BAS Comments to: Eberhard Reichmann, reichman@ucs.indiana.edu This page sponsored and maintained by IUPUI University Libraries. URL: http://www.ulib.iupui.edu/kade/merrill/lesson4.html |
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