Pennsylvania German: Maintenance and Shift

German immigrants who are called Pennsylvania Germans (more commonly known as the Pennsylvania Dutch) came to America as early as 1683 in order to escape economic hardship and religious persecution and were part of the colonial population of the United States. The largest proportion of the Germans arriving before the Revolutionary War came from an area of the Rhine Valley called the Palatinate, although other Germans also joined them from surrounding areas, Swabia,Württemberg, Bavaria, Hessen and the Germanspeaking areas of Switzerland. For purposes of this paper, Pennsylvania German will be defined as those persons descended from German immigrants who settled in Pennsylvania during and shortly after the Colonial Period. The German dialect which continues to be spoken natively by many Pennsylvania Germans resembles most closely the dialects spoken in the eastern half of the Rhenish Palatinate (Buffington 1939). Scholars traditionally call Pennsylvania German a German dialect. Whether it is, indeed, a dialect or separate Germanic language is subject to extralinguistic debate. Important for this discussion is that Pennsylvania German is a language separate and distinct from English. The fact that Pennsylvania German has been able to exist within the American culture for over 200 years has frequently been explained by emphasizing the isolate and rural nature of the Pennsylvania Germans as a whole. The language and the group as an ethnic entity continue to persist despite earlier predictions of their imminent total assimilation. The group provides an interesting paradigm of the nature of language maintenance and shift because within the total Pennsylvania German community is enmeshed a variety of subgroups, each having a different relation to the dominant culture. The Pennsylvania German community is not one community, culturally or linguistically, and it is doubtful that it ever was one.