Made In America - Bill Bryson [95]
Occasionally rearguard actions were fought. In 1890, when a law was introduced requiring English to be used exclusively in parochial schools in Milwaukee, the German community was so incensed that it turfed out the city’s Republican administration and brought in a Democratic one. As late as the outbreak of World War I, Baltimore had four elementary schools that taught exclusively in German. Already, however, those trying to protect their linguistic heritage were fighting a losing battle.
All this is understandable in urban areas where it was necessary and desirable to venture out of the neighbourhood from time to time, and where mingling between various immigrant groups was inevitable. It doesn’t so easily explain more isolated communities. At the turn of the century throughout the Midwest there existed hundreds of towns or clusters of towns inhabited almost exclusively by specific linguistic groups. Iowa, for instance, had Elk Horn (founded by Danes), Pella (by the Dutch) and the Amana Colonies (by Germans), among many others. In each of these places, the local populace was both homogeneous and sufficiently remote to escape the general pressure to become Americanized. Even if they learned English in order to listen to the radio and converse with outsiders, we might reasonably expect them to preserve their mother tongue for private use. In fact, almost without exception, they did not. By the 1930s in such towns English was not only the main language spoken but the only language spoken. Even those German immigrants who came to America with the intention of founding a Kleindeutschland, or Little Germany, in Texas or Wisconsin, eventually gave up the fight. Today it is unusual to find anyone in any such town who knows more than a few words of his ancestors’ tongue. Clearly even here the desire to feel a part of the wider culture proved irresistible in the long term.
Only one group has managed to resist in significant numbers the temptations of English. I refer to the speakers of the curious dialect that is known generally, if mistakenly, as Pennsylvania Dutch. The name is an accident of history. From the early eighteenth century to almost the end of the nineteenth, Dutch in American English was applied not just to the language of Holland and its environs, but to much else that was bewilderingly foreign, most especially the German language – doubtless in confusion with the German word ‘Deutsch’.
The Germans came to Pennsylvania at the invitation of William Penn, who believed that their ascetic religious principles fitted comfortably with his own Quaker beliefs. The German influx, eventually comprising about 100,000 people, or a third of Pennsylvania’s population, was made up of a variety of loosely related sects, notably Mennonites, Schwenkenfelders, Dunkards, Moravians and Amish, but it was the Amish in particular who spoke the Palatinate dialect of High German that eventually evolved into the tongue that most know as Pennsylvania Dutch. To the Pennsylvania Dutch the language is called Muddersrschprooch. To scholars and the linguistically fastidious it is Pennsylvania German.
For a century and a half Pennsylvania German was largely ignored by scholars. Not until 1924, when Marcus Bachman Lambert published a Dictionary of the Non-English Words of the Pennsylvania-German Dialect, with just under 17,000 entries, did it