1985/01/01 by Kenneth Shields · 2 citations
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Linguistics, Language Diversity, and Identity #Lexicography and Language Studies #Linguistic Variation and Morphology #History
paper · doi:10.2307/454887
openalex publication_date 1985/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2025/11/06
I ter, Pennsylvania, like to tell story about a Dutch farmer who allowed his favorite son to go to college. On graduation boy jumped off train and ran a few steps to meet his folks standing shyly in background. His dear old mother said: 'John, I'm so proud of you; you're a college graduate now, ain't?Ya, Mom; I'm one now,'said boy. 'Well, I hope you learned a lot in four long years you was away,' said father. 'Why, Pop, you know'd when I went away to college I couldn't say north or south; and now I can say bose of them,' he replied (Aurand n.d., 32). The moral of story, of course, is that the 'Dutch' will come out. In a more scholarly manner, Kurath (1949, 35) comes to same conculsion in his unqualified assertion of existence of a German area within North Midland Region. More recently, he has reiterated that Pennsylvania German words have entered English spoken in Great Valley of eastern Pennsylvania, fertile farm land of which York, Lancaster, Reading, Allentown, and Bethlehem are urban centers ... Germanisms are most numerous in eastern Pennsylvania-the area that has been bilingual from Colonial times to presentand.., .their number diminishes in a westerly and southwesterly direction, where German is no longer spoken(1972, 60). Kurath's observations are based on research which was undertaken nearly a half century ago. The passage of time and unrelenting progress of linguistic change have prompted such scholars as Duckert (1963) to initiate new surveys of those areas investigated by fieldworkers of original Linguistic Atlas of United States and Canada project, and it is in this spirit that I have begun to reassess dialect situation in eastern by means of a printed lexical questionnaire. Currently over 150 field records have been collected. However, in this brief paper, I want to report only on some of results obtained by administering this questionnaire to residents of Lancaster, Lebanon, York, and Dauphin Counties. My focus will be on Germanisms which supposedly characterize this heartland of German area, according to Kurath (1949) and other standard sources, although I will also consider status of some Germanisms whose origin can be traced to this region but whose distribution is generally de-