By DR. J. WILLIAM FREY
_Chairman of the Department of German and Russian at Franklin and
Marshall College_
We bisht? We gaits? (How are you? How goes it?) That’s the familiar
greeting throughout the length and breadth of the Pennsylvania Dutch
country. This is symbolic of the relative sameness of the Pennsylvania
Dutch tongue no matter where you go in southeastern Pennsylvania or, in
fact, anywhere else a Dutchman has happened to wander. This is
linguistically and culturally a unique phenomenon. Travel in any
European country—staying away from the large cities—and you will find
almost mutually unintelligible dialects spoken from one community to the
next, a mere dozen or so miles away. These wide language divergencies
reflect vast cultural-historical differences, deep-rooted in tradition
and folkways. But in the Pennsylvania Dutchland—whether you visit the
Amish on their unparalleled farms of Lancaster County or whether you
call on the Church groups (Lutheran and Reformed) located almost
directly north of Philadelphia—you will find Pennsylvania Dutch spoken
and understood with only enough differences to make it interesting. In
fact, there is not nearly so much difference in the pronunciation and
vocabulary and idioms of one brand of Pennsylvania Dutch from another as
there is, say, between the native speech of a Bostonian and that of a
Charlestonian!
The uniqueness of the situation is perhaps amazing to a European, but
hardly to an American. Here in the greatest melting pot culture in the
world it is no new thing to find widely diversified groups leveling off
their ways and their speech to form a common American denominator. In
the Pennsylvania Dutch country we have by far the most widely
diversified folk culture in America and at the same time a unity of
language which astounds the scholars of linguistic science. There has
never really been any such thing as a ‘united front’ among the
Pennsylvania Dutch people—no nationalistic-political ties, no yearning
for some once-deserted-now-idealized ‘fatherland,’ no dominant (nor
domineering) religious body. Hence, our language has never taken on any
‘standardizing’ regulations, has never been given a hard and fast
orthography, has never been elevated to the position of a subject in the
public school curriculum, has never enjoyed the so-called dignity of
great oratory, classic literature or even journalism.
It has always been and always will be only FOLK SPEECH. As such it is
the perfect oral expression of our Pennsylvania Dutch folk and their
rich folk culture. But as such it has also suffered greatly—mocked and
despised and branded as ‘only a dialect,’ ‘a corrupt form of German,’ ‘a
kind of Pennsylvania hog Latin’ by all those in the past who, not
appreciating nor even knowing what folk culture really is and means,
could see no good in a language which according to their puny and narrow
educational background ‘did not even have a grammar or a dictionary’!
Only very recently have those of us who are interested in the study of
folk cultures and folk linguistics seen the real and underlying values
in the language—now, at a time when it is very rapidly dying out, when
hardly any member of the new generation speaks anything but English
(though that with often a heavy Pennsylvania Dutch savor), when the near
future will witness the almost complete disappearance of this
interesting, humorous, beloved folk speech except for its persistent
employment by the Old Order Amish in their religious services and most
of their everyday conversations.
No grammar? EVERY language has grammar—Pennsylvania Dutch has its share
to be sure. There are ten parts of speech, three genders of nouns (and
you can’t hang a feminine article on a masculine noun!).
‘_Outen the light_’ is our common Lancaster County way of saying ‘turn
out the light,’ and it is simply a short and efficient expression for
getting the deed accomplished. The same is true of the shortened form
‘_this after_’ instead of ‘this afternoon’—an expression you’ll hear
from the lips of every Lancaster City and County inhabitant.
Some expressions in our quaint English here are actually direct
translations from the Pennsylvania Dutch language, but they have become
such common property that many a Lancastrian uses them even though his
background is anything but Dutch. For example, a beautiful little phrase
to indicate that you ‘live next door’ to someone is the very warm idiom:
‘_they live neighbors to us_’ or ‘_we live neighbors to them_.’ Now
isn’t that a real friendly way of putting it?
Actually, then, the impress of Pennsylvania Dutch upon the Nation
linguistically has been negligible. It is not enough to boast about the
Pennsylvania Dutch ancestry of the Hoovers, the Earharts, and the
Eisenhowers when the Nation as a whole has not been conscious of the
existence of our deep-rooted folk culture over some nine generations.
Meanwhile, however, we bid farewell to the visitor in the Dutch country
with those familiar words heard in Lancaster County: _koom boll widder!_
(come soon again)—or, better, the idiom as it is used in the more
eastern counties: _koom ols widder_ (keep coming, and coming, and
coming, and coming to see us ...).