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at last begin to receive serious attention. Even now it remains relatively neglected as a topic of academic interest, which is a pity because few dialects provide a more instructive example of what happens to languages when they exist in isolation. As the linguist and historian C. Richard Beam has put it: ‘In an age when there are billions of dollars available for trips to the moon and destruction abroad, it is very difficult to procure even a few hundred dollars to help finance the production of a dictionary of the language of the oldest and largest German language island on the North American continent.‘31

Because it has always been primarily a colloquial, spoken dialect, very different in form and content from standard German, Pennsylvania German presents serious problems with orthography. Put simply, almost any statement can be rendered in a variety of spellings. Here, for instance, are three versions of the same text:

Die Hundstage kumme all Jahr un bleibe sechs ...

De hoons-dawga cooma allia yohr un bliva sex ...

Die Hundsdaage kumme aile Yaahr un blwewe sex ...32

During its long years of isolation, Pennsylvania German has become increasingly distinct from mainstream German. Many words bear the unmistakable mark of English influence, others preserve archaic or dialectal German forms, and still others have been coined in situ. The drift away from standard German can be seen in the following:

PENNSYLVANIA GERMAN STANDARD GERMAN ENGLISH

aageglesser Brillen eyeglasses

bauersleit Bauern farmers

bauerei Bauernhöfe farms

elfder elf eleven

feierblatz Kamin; Feuerplatz fireplace

eensich ebbes etwas; irgend etwas anything

Febber Februar February

dabbich ungeschickt clumsy

alde daage Alter old age

Schtaagefensich zick zack zigzag

Grischtdaag Weihnachten Christmas

Nei Yarick New York New York

A striking feature of Pennsylvania German is its wealth of curiously specific terms. Notions and situations that other languages require long clauses to convey can often be expressed with a single word in Pennsylvania German. For example:

fedderschei – the condition of being reluctant to write letters.

aagehaar – an eyelash hair that grows inwardly and irritates the sclera.

dachdrops – water dripping from a roof.

aarschgnoddle – the globules of dung found on hair in the vicinity of the anus. (And, no, I cannot think why they might need such a word.)

At its peak in the nineteenth century Pennsylvania German was spoken in communities as far afield as Canada, the upper Midwest and the deep South. Today, according to Beam, it constitutes ‘but the remnants of a unique German-American folk culture, so rapid has been the process of acculturation’.33 Estimates for the current number of speakers range as high as 16,000 – Marckwardt in 1980 said that up to a quarter of the inhabitants of Lehigh, Lebanon and Berks counties in Pennsylvania still spoke it34 – but the trend is implacably downward.

II

If one attitude can be said to characterize America’s regard for immigration over the past two hundred years it is the belief that while immigration was unquestionably a wise and prescient thing in the case of one’s parents or grandparents, it really ought to stop now. For two hundred years succeeding generations of Americans have persuaded themselves that the country faced imminent social dislocation, and eventual ruin, at the hands of the grasping foreign hordes pouring through her ports.

As early as the turn of the nineteenth century, Thomas Jefferson responded to calls for restrictions on immigration by asking, a trifle plaintively, ‘Shall we refuse the unhappy fugitives from distress that hospitality which the savages of the wilderness extended to our fathers arriving in this land?’ – though even he feared that immigrants with their ‘unbounded licentiousness’ would turn the United States into a ‘heterogeneous, incoherent, distracted mass’.35

From the earliest days, immigrants aroused alarm and attracted epithets. For the most part, early nicknames for foreigners were only mildly abusive – for example, calling the