Pennsylvania German as a Foundation for the Study of Standard German

Abstract

The attitude, unfortunately, of large percentage of high school and college teachers of German is still like that of eighteenth century grammarian who believed that literary and upperclass standard language was older and more true to standard of reason than local speech-forms, which were due to ignorance and carelessness of common people.' Too often do teachers of German compare forms of dialect with Standard German and then label everything which is different as or Low German.2 They are completely unaware of fact that dialects have always been feeders of literary language,s and that progress of historical linguistics has shown that the standard language is by no means oldest type, but has arisen, under particular historical conditions, from local dialects.' During past few years I have heard high school and college teachers of German describe Pennsylvania German as follows: a form of debased German, corrupt German, a mixture of bad German and English, a mixture of Dutch and English, Low German, or Low German with English words mixed in.