Strategies of language maintenance and ethnic marking among the Pennsylvania Germans

Abstract

Abstract In the Pennsylvania German community, each subgroup has devised its own strategies for maintaining Pennsylvania German and its own set of linguistic ethnic markers. The diglossic behavior of the separatist religious sects effectively maintains Pennsylvania German in their communities and, compared to the English of other Pennsylvania Germans, the English of the sectarians is relatively free of Pennsylvania German influence. Nonsectarian native speakers use Pennsylvania German as an in-group solidarity marker but do not speak it to their children. Their English is characterized by interference features which do not persist in subsequent generations. Among the nonfluent bilinguals and monolingual English speakers, English carries the markers of Pennsylvania German ethnic identification. These language behaviors are interpreted in terms of Giles's speech accomodation theory and ethnic boundary model. The results confirm the proposition that the most linguistic differentiation in the dominant language occurs in groups which have the softest nonlinguistic ethnic boundaries.