The German Influence on American English

As early as 1683, immigrants from the southwestern part of Germany had begun to settle in Pennsylvania. According to Glenn Gilbert's article "French and German: A Comparative Study," in Language in the USA, in the year 1790 there were already 176,400 persons with German surnames in the United States. This represented 5.6 percent of the total population.

The Germans were most highly concentrated then in southeastern Pennsylvania, where they made up 26.1 percent of the population. The Pennsylvania German group has been much better investigated than most, and historical records show that most of the immigrants were from the Palatinate, Baden, Württemberg and Switzerland. There were also German settlers in New Jersey, Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina. Although many German rural communities sprang up as a result of the migration, much of the settlement was metropolitan. In Milwaukee, Chicago, Cleveland, Cincinnati, St. Louis, Detroit, Buffalo and New York there were also many German immigrants.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, most of the immigrants from Belgium and Switzerland were also German-speaking. The number of German (and Yiddish) speakers from Switzerland, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland and further east was also substantial.

The immigrants from Germany are difficult to localise, both with regard to their origins and their ultimate destination. It may generally be claimed that those parts of the United States which received Germans in large numbers, received them from all parts of Germany. The majority of immigrants who came to the United States from German-speaking parts of Europe spoke primarily a regional or local dialect that differed substantially from Standard German.

Central Texas was a favourite destination of German immigrants two decades before the Civil War. There were almost no settlers from southern Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Baden and Württemberg. The levelled colonial language which developed in Texas consequently turned out very different from Pennsylvania German, which will be discussed later in this paper.

Most German borrowings came into English during the nineteenth century. Although both noodle, first cited by the Dictionary of American English in 1812 and sauerkraut, in 1813, seem to have been used in England considerably earlier, there is every reason to believe that the American use of these words represents an independent borrowing. These, along with Kris Kringle in 1830, loafer in 1835, poker in 1836 and ouch in 1839, must have come from Pennsylvania or its derivative settlements. The earliest citation dates from remaining words are distribute fairly evenly throughout the century.

In general the German borrowings have been nouns, but such interjections as nix, ouch and phooey have been assumed to be originated from German as well.. The list of German borrowings gives us an idea of the cultural contact between German immigrant