Did German almost become the language of the U.S.?
Nancy P. Nenno
What part did German immigrants play in
eighteenth-century America? Did they come close to making the young United States a German-speaking country? What’s ‘Liberty Cabbage’, and how did it get its name?
Th e offi cial language of the United States of America was almost—
German? It’s not true, but the so-called Mühlenberg legend is one that never seems to die. As the story goes, the U.S. would have become a German-speaking country in 1795 had it not been for a single vote in the House of Representatives—ironically, a vote putatively cast by a bilingual Representative from Pennsylvania, Frederick Augustus Conrad Mühlenberg. What’s the real story?
Well, it’s true that German was widely spoken in Philadelphia when the Congress met there. And it’s true that a group of farmers from
Did german almost become the language of the u. S.? 171
Virginia in the 1790s petitioned for a German translation of some American laws. But the cliffh anger vote that saved English? It never happened.
So where did the fear that German might supersede English as America’s language come from? It’s not quite as far-fetched as it might seem. Germans began immigrating to the U.S. as early as 1683, and from then until the First World War, German was the most prevalent language in Pennsylvania aft er English. Not everybody was happy about that. Consider what one senior statesman from the Revolutionary period had to say about the Germans: ‘Why,’ he asked,
‘should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them, and [who] will never adopt our Language or Customs, any more than they can acquire our Complexion?’
It might surprise you that these disturbing words came from the pen of none other than Benjamin Franklin.
Anti-foreign feelings persisted through the nineteenth century, but German continued to fl ourish in the U.S. Waves of English-only attacks, aimed at wiping German from the landscape, were coun-tered by public displays of German identity. German-Americans celebrated their heritage in social clubs and societies all over the country. All of that ended with the First World War, when most states actually eliminated German from their schools. In some states during the war, it was illegal to speak anything but English in public. It is estimated that 18,000 people in the Midwest were charged during these years with violating English-only statutes. Even German foods came under attack. Sauerkraut wasn’t outlawed, but it was renamed ‘Liberty Cabbage’.
During the Second World War, attitudes toward things German, and toward Americans of German ancestry, weren’t nearly so harsh.
Perhaps this milder reaction was due in part to the fact that, like the fi rst German immigrants to America, many of the German speakers who came to the U.S. before and during the war were fl ee-ing religious and political persecution. Among the most visible of
these refugees and exiles from Hitler’s Europe were fi lmworkers such as the actors Conrad Veidt and Peter Lorre, and directors Otto Preminger, Billy Wilder, and Fritz Lang. Ironically, they became part of a Hollywood that for decades has used German accents as a kind of shorthand to represent evil. Ever since the 1940s, in scores of fi lms from Casablanca to Raiders of the Lost Ark to Saving Private Ryan, the bad guys are always the ones who pronounce their W’s like V’s. Th ere are, of course, a lot of exceptions to that stereotype.
Marlene Dietrich’s songs derived much of their sexy appeal from her German accent. And Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Austrian cadences have become part of the U.S. cultural landscape.
It’s really astonishing how many people of German heritage there are in America. Th e best known, probably, are the so-called Pennsylvania Dutch. (Th eir ancestors, by the way, came to the U.S. not from the Netherlands but from Germany. Th ey called themselves ‘Deutsch’—the German word for ‘German’—but their English-speaking neighbors modifi ed that to a more familiar-sounding word.) Beyond Pennsylvania, there are so many people of German ancestry in the U.S. heartland that the states from Ohio to Missouri and from Michigan to Nebraska are sometimes known as ‘the German belt’. Th ere are even pockets of German speakers in the Shenandoah Valley, where they are referred to as the ‘Valley Dutch’. And in 1990, the so-called ‘Texas Deutsch’ emerged as the third largest ethnic group in that state. In fact, according to the 1990 census, more Americans of European ancestry claim German descent than Irish, English, or Italian.
On top of everything else, German has enriched English with marvelous vocabulary—from Autobahns to Zeppelins, from Frankfurters to Fahrenheit, from Wienerschnitzel to Wanderlust.
And even though German never seriously challenged English as the primary language of the U.S., the ties between the two lan-guages are long and deep. Shouldn’t we be paying more attention to German?
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About the author
Nancy P. Nenno is Associate Professor and Director of the German Program at the College of Charleston, South Carolina. She received her degrees at Brown University, in Rhode Island, and the University of California, Berkeley, and has studied at the University of Tübingen and the Free University of Berlin. Her research and publications focus primarily on twentieth-century German literature and fi lm. Her cur-rent project examines the role of African Americans in German culture between the world wars.
Suggestions for further reading
In this book: Other languages of America are discussed in chapters 25 (revitalizing threatened Native American languages), 35 (languages of the U.S.), 36 (America’s language crisis), 37 (Spanish in the U.S.), 38 (Ca-jun), 40 (Gullah), and 49 (Native American languages). Other sociolin-guistic topics are talked about in chapters 8 (pidgins and creoles) and 19 (language confl ict).
Elsewhere:
Adams, Willi Paul. Th e German-Americans: An Ethnic Experience (German Information Center, 1993). Part of the Peoples of North America series, this booklet off ers an historical and cultural overview of German immigration and assimilation in the U.S. Includes an excellent chronology of Germans in America.
Crystal, David. ‘A planning myth’, in Th e Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (Cambridge University Press, second edition 1997), p. 367. A concise description of the famous vote-that-never-was.
Gilbert, Glenn G., ed. Th e German Language in America. A Symposium (University of Texas Press, 1971). A collection of papers from a scholarly conference.
Heath, Shirley Brice, and Frederick Mandabach. ‘Language status deci-sions and the law in the United States’, a paper presented at the confer-ence Progress in Language Planning: International Perspectives (Wayne, NJ, 1979), pp. 87–105. A scholarly but approachable article about British language politics in the Colonies through the nineteenth century.
Bussman, H., et. al. ‘Pennsylvania Dutch’, in Routledge Dictionary of Language and Linguistics (Routledge, 1996), p. 353. A concise history of the characteristics and continued existence of this dialect in the Eastern United States.
Web site:
http://www.watzmann.net/scg/germany-by-one-vote.html
Barron, Dennis. ‘Urban legend: German almost became the offi cial language of the U.S.’ Barron demolishes the Mühlenberg myth and reveals that German-speakers were even blamed for the severe winters in Pennsylvania.