German Language In The United States
Although over 50 million Americans claim German ancestry, which makes them the largest single ethnic group in the country, only around 1.38 million people speak German in the United States. It is the second most spoken language in the Dakotas.
Since the mass emigration of Germans to Pennsylvania in the early 1700s, all through the 1800s, and into the early 20th century, German was the second most widely spoken language in the United States after English. It was spoken by millions of immigrants from Germany and the Austro-Hungarian and Russian Empires, and their descendants. Many newspapers, churches and schools operated in German as did many businesses. The use of the language was strongly suppressed by social and legal means during World War I, and German declined as a result, limiting the widespread use of the language mainly to Amish and Old Order Mennonite communities.
Read more about German Language In The United States: History, Dialects and Geographic Distribution, German As The Official US Language Myth, German-American Tradition in Literature, Use in Education
Famous quotes containing the words united states, german, language, united and/or states:
“Hollywood ... was the place where the United States perpetrated itself as a universal dream and put the dream into mass production.”
—Angela Carter (1940–1992)
“Have you never heard of German Becoming, of German Wandering, of the endless migratings of the German soul? Even foreigners know our word ‘Wanderlust.’ If you like, the German is the eternal student, the eternal searcher, among the peoples of the earth.”
—Thomas Mann (1875–1955)
“Strange goings on! Jones did it slowly, deliberately, in the bathroom, with a knife, at midnight. What he did was butter a piece of toast. We are too familiar with the language of action to notice at first an anomaly: the ‘it’ of ‘Jones did it slowly, deliberately,...’ seems to refer to some entity, presumably an action, that is then characterized in a number of ways.”
—Donald Davidson (b. 1917)
“The United States is a republic, and a republic is a state in which the people are the boss. That means us. And if the big shots in Washington don’t do like we vote, we don’t vote for them, by golly, no more.”
—Willis Goldbeck (1900–1979)
“We cannot feel strongly toward the totally unlike because it is unimaginable, unrealizable; nor yet toward the wholly like because it is stale—identity must always be dull company. The power of other natures over us lies in a stimulating difference which causes excitement and opens communication, in ideas similar to our own but not identical, in states of mind attainable but not actual.”
—Charles Horton Cooley (1864–1929)