Swiss German in Wisconsin: The Assessment of Changes in Case Marking

Abstract

The village of New Glarus, which is named for one of the smallest cantons in Switzerland, is located southwest of Madison in Green County, Wisconsin. ' As Eichhoff (1971, 57) has pointed out, there is no single linguistic entity that might be called Wisconsin German. Swiss German is one of the many individual German dialects ranging from Low German to High Alemannic that have been spx)ken in the state. Relatively few of these dialects have been the subject of a detailed linguistic study. The present article will give a brief history of settlement and language use in New Glarus, review accounts of changes in case marking in other American Gerirwn dialects and assess the changes of this type that have occurred in a dialect of Swiss German spoken in New Glarus.The history of New Glarus and the surrounding area is typical of that of rural nineteenth-century German communities in the Midwest.^ The village was founded in 1845 by immigrants from Canton Glarus who had left the canton for economic reasons. Immigration reached a peak in 1860 when 446 newcomers arrived to increase the population of New Glarus to 960. In the first twenty years of the settlement the majority of the Swiss settlers came from Glarus, but after this there was little immigration from this source, except again in the 1880s, when Glarus experienced further economic problems. Smaller numbers of immigrants arrived from other Swiss cantons, especially Canton Bern. Swiss settlement eventually spread over most parts of Green County and into neighboring counties. Today, this is a region of dairy farming, in the development of which the Swiss played a major role. Dairy farming was introduced by immigrants from Bern and only taken up by the settlers from Glarus in Wisconsin.Language use in New Glarus was stable in the nineteenth century. At the turn of the century, English was the language for both everyday and official contacts with non-Swiss and was one of the languages of the