Semantic Borrowing in Pennsylvania German

Abstract

IN A SUMMARY of recent studies in the field of bilingualism Einar Haugen has emphasized the fact that 'few countries are more ideally suited for bilingual study than the United States,' where about io percent of the population speak a childhood language other than English.2 The two-century-old PaGS speech island, which covers almost one third of the state of Pennsylvania, affords especially favorable conditions for the observation of linguistic change brought about by the impact of two different cultures and languages upon each other. As Otto Springer has so aptly stated, the significance of such firsthand observations of the results, and sometimes even of the actual process, of interlingual influence (quite aside from their intrinsic interest to persons of polylingual background) consists in the fact that they often shed welcome light upon more obscure parallel situations farther removed from us in time and space.4 It is rather surprising, therefore, that although English loan words in PaG have been the object of much popular and some scientific comment, the more subtle but less obvious evidences of English pressure upon the PaG vocabulary have been markedly neglected. The intimate fusions of the two languages commonly known as hybrids, for which Haugen has suggested the designation loanblends,6 were treated by the writer in two previous articles.7 The related problems of loan trans-