Appendix
1. Germanic
a. German
The so-called Pennsylvania-Dutch area of Pennsylvania and Maryland covers about 17,500 square miles. It began to be invaded by Germans before the end of the Seventeenth Century, and by 1775 nearly 90,000 had come in. They came "almost exclusively from Southwestern Germany ... with the Palatines predominating.
Pennsylvania-Dutch is based mainly upon the Westricher dialect of the Palatinate, and in the course of two centuries has become extraordinarily homogeneous. In the heart of its homeland, in Lehigh, Berks and Lebanon counties, Pennsylvania, between 60% and 65% of the total inhabitants can speak it, and between 30% and 35% use it constantly. The fact that it has survived the competition of English for so many years is due mainly to the extreme clannishness of the people speaking it -- a clannishness based principally upon religious separatism. This theological prepossession has colored their somewhat scanty literature, and most of the books they have produced have been of pious tendency. They printed the Bible three times before ever it was printed in English and in America. The language was called Dutch by their English and Scotch-Irish neighbors because the early immigrants themselves called it Deitsch (H. Ger. Deutsch), and not because they were mistaken for Hollanders.
b. Dutch
As in the case of American German, two main varieties of Dutch American are to be found in the United States. The first is a heritage from the days of the Dutch occupation of the Hudson and Delaware river regions, and the second is the speech of more recent immigrants, chiefly domiciled in Michigan, Iowa, Minnesota and the Dakotas. The former is now virtually extinct, but in 1910, while it was still spoken by about 200 persons, it was studied by Dr. J. Dyneley Prince, then professor of Semitic languages at Columbia, and now professor of Slavonic.
c. Swedish
The early Swedish immigrants to the United States, says Dr. George M. Stephenson, spoke a multitude of Swedish dialects, but they soon vanished in the melting-pot, and "everybody spoke a ludicrous combination of English and Swedish that neither an American nor a recent arrival fro Sweden could understand."
To the children of the first American-born generation Swedish "was almost a dead language; it had to be kept alive artificially. Instead of using the conversational forms of the personal pronouns mej and dej, they said mig and dig. They were so proper that they were improper.
d. Dano-Norwegian
The pioneer stud of the Dano-Norwegian spoken by Norwegian immigrants to the United States was published by Dr. Nils Flaten, of NOrthfield, Minn., in 1900.
e. Icelandic
The only study of American Icelandic in English that I have been able to unearth is a paper on its loan-nouns, published more than thirty years ago by Vilhjalmur Stefansson, the Arctic explorer, who was born in the Icelandic colony at Arnes, Manitoba, on Lake Winnipeg.
f. Yiddish
Yiddish, though it is spoken by Jews, and shows a high admixture of Hebrew, and is written in Hebrew characters, is basically a Middle High German dialect, greatly corrupted, not only by Hebrew, but also by Russian, Polish, Lithuanian, Hungarian, and, in the United States, English.
2. Latin
a. French
Ever since the close of the Eighteenth Century patriotic French-Canadians have been voicing fears that the French language would be obliterated from their country, soon or late, by the growth of English, but so far it ha not happened.
b. Italian
c. Spanish
d. Poruguese
There are thirteen Portuguese publications in the country, including a daily, the Diaria de Noticias, at New Bedford, Mass., where the largest Portuguese colony is located.
e. Rumanian
3. Slavic
a. Czech
The first American loan-words, he says, were taken into American Czech by journalists and lecturers "whose chief claim to intellectual superiority seemed to rest, like that of some American Negroes, upon a propensity to employ a terminology unintelligible to the ordinary person."
b. Slovak
c. Russian
d. Ukrainian
e. Serbo-Croat and Slovene
f. Lithuanian
g. Polish
In September, 1933, at a meeting of the Syndykat Dziennikarzy Polskich w Ameryce (Society of Polish-American Journalists) at Chicago, Mr. Ernest Lillien read a paper on "The Polish Language and Polish-American Writers." It was devoted mainly to the sins of the speaker's fellow-journalists, and was full of amusing stories. There was, for example, about the Polish-American telegraph-editor who received a press dispatch one night (in English, of course) about a storm that had knocked over fifty telegraph-poles, and who translated poles as Polacks, to the consternation of his Polish readers.
4. Finno-Ugrian
a. Finnish
It appears to be related only very remotely, if at all, to the other prevailing languages of Europe. It has fifteen cases, and all of them save the nominative are indicated by adding postpositions to the root. The root itself must always end in a vowel or diphthong. A loan-word, if it ends in a consonant, has a vowel-ending attached to it. Thus house, in the nominative, becomes haussi, from the house (elative) is haussista, and into the house (translative) is haussiksi.
b. Hungarian
Hungarian, like Finnish, belongs to the Finno-Ugrian group of languages, and in its structure differs very widely from English.
5. Celtic
a. Gaelic
The Irish in America have made little progress in reacquiring the Goidelic Celti which passes under the name of Gaelic in Ireland, and is now so busily inculcated by the Free State politicians. Some of the older folk among them make shift to speak it, but certainly not many. A column or so in it is sometimes printed in the Irish weeklies, but few can read it. The Welsh cling more resolutely to their national speech, which belongs to the Brythonic branch of Celtic, and there are two periodicals devoted to it -- a monthly called Cyfaill and a weekly called Y Drych, both published at Utica, NY.
6. Semitic
a. Arabic
The chief speakers of Arabic in the United States are the Syrians, most of them Christians from the Lebanon. There are also some Moslems and Druzes, but not many. These Syrians used to be classified in the Census returns as Turks, but they are now properly segregated.
7. Greek
a. Modern Greek
Classical Greek never begat children which devoured it, as classical Latin begat the Romance languages; nevertheless, it suffered serious injuries as the Hellenic world disintegrated. On the Greek mainland it now has two forms.
8. Asiatic
a. Chinese
As we have seen in Chapter XII, Section I, the influence of English on Chinese, even in China, is already very considerable. Not only does Chinese absorb a great many English and American loan-words; it also tends toward grammatical and syntactical accord with English.
b. Japanese
Standard Japanese, even more than Chinese, has been hospitable to English loan-words, and in Chapter XII, Section I, I have described some of their effects upon the language. The Japanese spoken in this country, is full of them. On account of the differences between the Japanese phonetic system and that of English many have to be changed materially. Every Japanese word ends either in a vowel or in n.
9. Miscellaneous
a. Armenian
b. Hawaiian
c. Gypsy
V. The Language Today
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