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”:
Heit is ’s ’xäcdy zwansig Johr,
Dass ich bin owwe naus;
Nau bin ich widder lewig z’rick
Und schteh am Schulhaus an d’r Krick,
Juscht neekscht an’s Dady’s Haus
Oh horcht, ihr Leit, wu nooch mir lebt,
Ich schreib eich noch des Schtick:
Ich warn eich, droh eich, gebt doch Acht,
Un nemmt uf immer gut enacht,
Des Schulhaus an der Krick!7
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:
Nom. der die des-’s die
Dat. dem-’m der dem-’m dene
Ace. den-der die des-’s die
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:
’S war eimol ei Mätel, wu ihr Liebling fat in der Grieg is, un’ is dot gmacht wure. Sie hut sich so arg gedrauert un’ hut ksat: “O wann ich ihn just noch eimol sehne könnt!” Ei Ovet is sie an ’n Partie gange, aver es war ken Freud dat für sie. Sie hut gwünscht, ihre Lieve war dat au. Wie freundlich sie sei hätt könne! Sie is ’naus in den Garde gange, un’ war allei im Monlicht khockt. Kschwind hut sie ’n Reiter höre komme. ’S war ihre Lieve ufm weisse Gaul. Er hut ken Wat ksat, aver hut sie uf den Gaul hinner sich gnomme, un’ is fatgritte.…9
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 dailies10 print humorous columns done in it. I offer a specimen from “Der Charlie,” a feature of the New York Staats-Zeitung:
“Was machst du denn in Amerika?” fragt der alte Onkel.
Well, der Kuno war sehr onnest. “Ich bin e Stiefellegger,” sagt er.
“Bist du verrückt geworden?” rohrt der Onkel. “Was ist denn das?”
“Das,” sagt der Kuno, “is a Antivereinigtestaatenconstitutionsverbesserungs-spirituosenwarenhändler.”11
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:
Wenn die Robins Loff tun mache’,
Wenn der Frontlawn leicht ergrünt,
Wenn der Lilacbushes shprouteh,
Peddlers in der Alley shouteh,
Da wird bei uns hausgecleant.12
“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 livin
g 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
b. Dutch
As in the case of American German, two main varieties of Dutch American are to be found in the United States. The first is a heritage from the days of the Dutch occupation of the Hudson and Delaware river regions, and the second is the speech of more recent immigrants, chiefly domiciled in Michigan, Iowa, Minnesota and the Dakotas. The former is now virtually extinct, but in 1910, while it was still spoken by about 200 persons, it was studied by Dr. J. Dyneley Prince, then professor of Semitic languages at Columbia, and now professor of Slavonic.15 It was originally, he said,
the South Holland or Flemish language, which, in the course of centuries (c. 1630–1880), became mixed with and partially influenced by English, having borrowed also from the Mindi (Lenâpe-Delaware) Indian language a few animal and plant names. This Dutch has suffered little or nothing from modern Holland or Flemish immigration, although Paterson (the county seat of Passaic county) has at present [1910] a large Netherlands population. The old county people hold themselves strictly aloof from these foreigners, and say, when they are questioned as to the difference between the idioms: “Onze tal äz lex däuts en hoelliz äs Holläns; kwait dääfrent” (Our language is Low Dutch and theirs is Holland Dutch; quite different). An intelligent Fleming or South Hollander with a knowledge of English can make shift at following a conversation in this Americanized Dutch, but the converse is not true.
Contact with English wore off the original inflections, and the definite and indefinite articles, dè and en, became uniform for all genders. The case-endings nearly all disappeared, in the comparison of adjectives the superlative affix decayed from -st to -s, the person-endings in the conjugation of verbs fell off, and the pronouns were much simplified. The vocabulary showed many signs of English influence. A large number of words in daily use were borrowed bodily, e.g., bottle, town, railroad, cider, smoke, potato, match, good-bye. Others were borrowed with changes, e.g., säns (since), määm (ma’m), belange (belong), boddere (bother), bääznas (business), orek (earache). In still other cases the drag of English was apparent, as in blaubäse, a literal translation of blueberry (the standard Dutch word is heidebes), in mep’lbom (mapletree; D., ahoornboom), and in njeuspapier (newspaper; D., nieuwsblad or courant). A few English archaisms were preserved, e.g., the use of gentry, strange in America, as a plural for gentleman. This interesting dialect now exists only in the memory of a few old persons, and in Dr. Prince’s excellent monograph.
The Dutch spoken by the more recent immigrants from Holland in the Middle West has been very extensively modified by American influences, both in vocabulary and in grammar. As in Jersey Dutch and in Afrikaans, the Dutch dialect of South Africa,16 there has been a decay of inflections, and the neuter article het has been absorbed by the masculine-feminine article de. Says Prof. Henry J. G. Van Andel, of the chair of Dutch history, literature and art in Calvin College at Grand Rapids: “Almost all the American names of common objects, e.g., stove, mail, carpet, bookcase, kitchen, store, post-office, hose, dress, pantry, porch, buggy, picture, newspaper, ad, road, headline, particularly when they differ considerably from the Dutch terms, have been taken into the everyday vocabulary. This is also true of a great many verbs and adjectives, e.g., to move (moeven), to dig (diggen), to shop (shoppen), to drive (drijven), slow, fast, easy, pink, etc. The religious language has remained pure, but even here purity has only a relative meaning, for the constructions employed are often English.”17 English loan-nouns are given Dutch plural endings, e.g., boxen (boxes), roaden (roads) and storen (stores), English verbs go the same route, e.g., threshen (to thresh), raken (to rake) and graden (to grade), and Dutch prefixes are used in the past tense, e.g., ge-cut and ge-mailed.18 Sometimes these borrowings cause a certain confusion, e.g., drijven (to drive) means to float in Standard Dutch.19 There is an extensive borrowing of English idioms, e.g., “What is de troebel?”20 A little book of sketches by Dirk Nieland, called “Yankee-Dutch”21 contains some amusing examples, e.g., piezelmietje (pleased to meet you), and there are more in his “ ’N Fonnie Bisnis,”22 e.g., aan de we (on the way), baaienbaai (by and by), evverwansinnewail (every once in a while), goedveurnotting (good for nothing), and of kos (of course). Mr. Nieland is fond of Americanisms, and introduces them in all his sketches, e.g., bieviedies (B.V.D.’s), sokker (sucker), bokhous (bughouse), boonhed (bonehead), sonnie (sundae), domtom (downtown), draaigoeds (dry-goods), gesselien (gasoline), hoombroe (home-brew), jenneker (janitor), lemmen-paai (lemon-pie), and sannege — (son of a —). In baasie (bossy) the American Dutch have borrowed an American adjective made from what was originally a Dutch noun.
In 1930 there were 133,142 persons in the United States whose mother-tongue was Dutch. Of these, 133,133 had been born in Holland. In addition, there were 170,417 persons of Dutch parentage and 110,416 of partly Dutch parentage, or 413,966 in all. There are no Dutch daily newspapers in the country, but there are ten Dutch and two Flemish weeklies.23
c. Swedish
The early Swedish immigrants to the United States, says Dr. George M. Stephenson,24 spoke a multitude of Swedish dialects, but they soon vanished in the melting-pot, and “everybody spoke a ludicrous combination of English and Swedish that neither an American nor a recent arrival from Sweden could understand.” To the children of the first American-born generation Swedish “was almost a dead language; it had to be kept alive artificially. Instead of using the conversational forms of the personal pronouns, me; and dej, they said mig and dig. They were so proper that they were improper.”25 The resultant jargon has been investigated at length by various Swedish-Americans of philological leanings, and especially by Mr. V. Berger, of the Nordstjernan (North Star) of New York, and by Rektor Gustav Andreen, of Rock Island, Ill.,26 and there have also been studies of it by philologians at home.27 It shows all the changes that we have just seen in German and Dutch. It takes in a multitude of American English words bodily, e.g., ajskrim (icecream), baggage, bartender, bissniss (business), blajnpigg (blind-pig), bockvete (buckwheat), dinner, dress, dude, frilunsch (free-lunch), fäs (face), good-bye, höraka (hay-rake), jabb or jobb (job), jäl (jail), klerk (clerk), ledi (lady), license, meeting, mister, nice, peanut, påcketbok (pocketbook), saloon, supper, svetter (sweater), taul (towel), trunktject (trunk-check), trubbel (trouble), velis (valise); it displaces many Swedish words with translations of analogous but not cognate English words, e.g., bransoldat (fireman) with brandman, brefkort (postcard) with postkort, ekonomidirektör (business-manager) with affärsförståndare, hushållsgoromål (housework) with husarbete, husläkare (family doctor) with familje-medicin; and it takes over a large number of English idioms, either by translation or by outright adoption, e.g., bära i minne (to bear in mind), efter allt (after all), gå republikanskt (to go Republican), i familjen (in the family), Junibrud (June bride), kalla till ordning (to call to order), på tid (on time). In forming the plurals of loan-nouns, it not infrequently adds the Swedish plural article to the English s, e.g., träcksena (the tracks) and karsarne (the cars). Sometimes the singular article is suffixed to plurals, e.g., buggsen (bugs) and tingsen (things). In other cases the English s is used alone, e.g., ekers (acres). Kars is used as a singular noun, en kars meaning one car. The suffixal singular articles, -en and -et, are, of course, often (but not always) added to loan-nouns in the s
ingular, e.g., trusten (trust), sutkäsen (suitcase) and homesteadet (homestead), and the loan-verbs take the Swedish suffixes a or ar, e.g., mixa (to mix), kicka (to keep), talkar (to talk), resa garden (to raise a garden), and påka funn (to poke fun).28 There are sometimes difficulties when loan-words resemble or are identical with Swedish words. Thus, barn means a child in Swedish; nevertheless, it is used, and Mr. Berger says that barn-dance is in common use also. Grisa (to grease) also offers embarrassments, for it means to give birth to pigs in Swedish. So does fitta (to fit), which, in Swedish, signifies the female pudenda. Loan-words borrowed by American from other languages go into American-Swedish with the native terms, e.g., bas (boss), which is of Dutch origin; luffa (to loaf), which is German;29 and vigilans (vigilantes) which is Spanish. The Swedish-American puts his sentences together American fashion. At home he would say Bröderna Anderson, just as the German would say Gebrüder Anderson, but in America he says Anderson Bröderna. In Sweden all over is öfverallt; in America, following the American construction, it becomes allt öfver. Min vän (my friend) is Americanized into en vän af mina (a friend of mine). The American verb to take drags its Swedish relative, taga, into strange places, as in taga kallt (to take cold), taga nöje i (to take pleasure in), taga fördel af (to take advantage of), and taga tåget (to take a train). The thoroughly American use of right is imitated by a similar use of its equivalent, rätt, as in rätt av (right off), räti i väg (right away) and rätt intill (right next to), or by the bold adoption of rite. All right, well and other such American counter-words are used constantly, and so are hell and damn. The Swedish-American often exiles the preposition, imitating the American vulgate, to the end of the sentence. He uses the Swedish af precisely as if it were the English of, and i as if it were in. Some instructive specimens of his speech are in “Mister Colesons Sverigeressa,” by Gabriel Carlson,30 for example:
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