Germanisms in Pennsylvania English: An Update

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. This content downloaded from 129.96.252.188 on Tue, 06 Oct 2015 22:24:31 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions GERMANISMS IN PENNSYLVANIA ENGLISH: AN UPDATE KENNETH SHIELDS, JR.Millersville University E GUIDES AT THE VARIOUS tourist sites on the easten side of Lancas-I ter, Pennsylvania, like to tell the story about a Dutch farmer who "allowed his favorite son to go to college. On graduation the boy jumped off the train and ran a few steps to meet his folks standing shyly in the 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 the boy. 'Well, I hope you learned a lot in the four long years you was away,' said the 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 the story, of course, is that "the 'Dutch' will come out."In a more scholarly manner, Kurath (1949, 35) comes to the same conculsion in his unqualified assertion of the existence of a Pennsylvania German area within the North Midland Region. More recently, he has reiterated that "Pennsylvania German words have entered the English spoken in the Great Valley of eastern Pennsylvania, the fertile farm land of which York, Lancaster, Reading, Allentown, and Bethlehem are the urban centers ... Germanisms are most numerous in eastern Pennsylvania-the area that has been bilingual from Colonial times to the 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 the unrelenting progress of linguistic change have prompted such scholars as Duckert (1963) to initiate new surveys of those areas investigated by fieldworkers of the original Linguistic Atlas of the United States and Canada project, and it is in this spirit that I have begun to reassess the dialect situation in eastern Pennsylvania 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 the results obtained by administering this questionnaire to residents of Lancaster, Lebanon, York, and Dauphin Counties. My focus will be on the Germanisms which supposedly characterize this heartland of the Penn-

Dialect Differences in Central Pennsylvania: Regional Dialect Use and Adaptation by African Americans in the Lower Susquehanna Valley

“…In this study there were differences discovered among the European American participants in the rates of familiarity with the LSV lexicon according to age. These findings confirm those of other studies (e.g., Shields 1985) that have found apparent-time differences in lexical patterns among European American LSV speakers, specifically that the younger speakers are abandoning the use of regional words and expressions. This shift in lexicon may be attributed to a variety of reasons.…”

“…Sure, I let it on the table. Although this has been identified as a salient feature in the LSV lexicon (Kurath 1949;Shields 1985) and has been shown to have both German and Scotch-Irish origins (Adams 2000), the difficulty of eliciting it led to its exclusion in this particular study. In hindsight, methodological constraints should not have prevailed here.…”

“…Other local words and expressions include those determined to be of Scotch-Irish origin, such as redd up (Reed 1949;Shields 1985;Carver 1987;Salvucci 1997).…”