Hybrid Compounds in Pennsylvania German

Abstract

tfiHE PAST DECADE has witnessed a striking renascence of scholarly 1 and popular interest in the Pennsylvania-German dialect. The 'Dutchified' English and especially the Americanized German of the bilingual inhabitants of southeastern Pennsylvania, both of which had long been the object of good-natured and sometimes also contemptuous ridicule by the nonlinguist, have recently become the subject of stimulating and informative linguistic studies. Since 1937 five doctoral dissertations and numerous articles have been written on Pennsylvania Dutch, as the dialect is widely known.2 Strangely enough, however, little attention has been paid to a characteristic feature of this dialect which is at the same time one of the most significant aspects of bilingualism. I refer to those intimate fusions of the two languages which we designate as hybrid compounds and hybrid derivatives. Lambert includes only lol hybrid compounds in the list of '51y words, wholly or partly of English origin,' which is appended to his well-known Dictionary of the Non-English Words of the Pennsylvania-German Dialect (Lancaster 1924). In this article I shall deal chiefly with hybrid compounds with only occasional reference to hybrid derivatives which I shall treat in detail elsewhere. All the examples of hybrid formations were taken from the spoken language and are in common usage. For approximately two centuries Pennsylvania German has existed as a speech island completely surrounded and crisscrossed by Englishspeaking communities. Even in colonial times the Pennsylvania Germans were obliged to use English occasionally in order to transact business with their English Welsh, and Irish neighbors. The English loan words and hybridized forms which resulted from the initial impact of the two languages sometimes reflect colonial pronunciation in regard to vowels and diphthongs, but usually show a high degree of assimilation to the phonemic pattern of the dialect in regard to consonants. The linguistic and social pressure of English on the speakers of the Pennsylvania