Language
The Germans from Russia originally spoke German or Mennonite Low German (Plautdietsch) at home. Since the villages in Russia often were populated by settlers from a particular region and were isolated from Germany, they maintained their regional dialects long after Germany standardized the language. Depending on their specific origin, Germans from Russia had difficulty understanding Standard German. It was only after emigrating from Russia to the Americas that the Germans lost their German dialects, generally within a few generations in their new countries. In the 1950s it was still common for the children in the Dakotas to speak in English and the parents and grandparents to use German. Songs in church would be sung in two languages simultaneously. Probably the person best known for having a "German from Russia accent" in English (a result of having learned English as a second language) was Lawrence Welk.
Read more about this topic: Germans From Russia
Famous quotes containing the word language:
“This is of the loon—I do not mean its laugh, but its looning,—is a long-drawn call, as it were, sometimes singularly human to my ear,—hoo-hoo-ooooo, like the hallooing of a man on a very high key, having thrown his voice into his head. I have heard a sound exactly like it when breathing heavily through my own nostrils, half awake at ten at night, suggesting my affinity to the loon; as if its language were but a dialect of my own, after all.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“It is still not enough for language to have clarity and content ... it must also have a goal and an imperative. Otherwise from language we descend to chatter, from chatter to babble and from babble to confusion.”
—René Daumal (1908–1944)
“The hypothesis I wish to advance is that ... the language of morality is in ... grave disorder.... What we possess, if this is true, are the fragments of a conceptual scheme, parts of which now lack those contexts from which their significance derived. We possess indeed simulacra of morality, we continue to use many of the key expressions. But we have—very largely if not entirely—lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, of morality.”
—Alasdair Chalmers MacIntyre (b. 1929)