Der schiltren dhey vas poot in ped,
All tucked oup for der nighdt;
I dakes mine pipe der mantel off,
Und py der fireside pright
I dinks aboudt vhen I vas young —
Off moder, who vas tead,
Und how at nighdt — like I do Hans —
She tucked me oup in ped.3
This stanza and the three that follow in the text well exhibit the earmarks of the German-American dialect as it was then understood, e.g., the change of ch to sh, of b to p, of p, to b, of th to d, of t to dt, of d to t, of v to f and of w to v, the diphthongization of o, and the tendency to put verbs and adverbs at the ends of sentences.4 In the 70s the so-called Dutch comedian became a popular figure on the American stage, and during the 80s and 90s that was a rare burlesque show or vaudeville which did not present at least one specimen of him.1 He perished in World War I, though perhaps not altogether in consequence of it, for the Irish, Scandinavian and Negro comic characters perished with him, and the Jew moved from the stage to books. In 1913 or thereabout Kurt M. Stein, of Chicago, began contributing doggerels written in a different German dialect to Bert Leston Taylor’s column in the Chicago Tribune. This dialect was not an English filled with Germanisms, but a German filled with Americanisms. A specimen:
Den andern abend ging mein frau
Und ich a walk zu nehme’.
Of course, wir könnten a machine
Affordern, but ich claime
Wer forty waist hat, wie mein frau,
Soll exzerseizah, anyhow.
These verses were well liked by the readers of the Tribune, and especially by the Germans among them, and they continued to appear until the entrance of the United States into World War I made everything German taboo. They were resumed after the war, and in 1925 a Chicago publisher brought out a volume under the title of “Die Schönste Lengevitch.” It was an immediate success, and was followed by “Gemixte Pickles” in 1927 and “Limburger Lyrics” in 1932.
Since 1909, when the late Montague Glass’s “Potash and Perl-mutter” stories began to appear in the Saturday Evening Post, the speech of the immigrant Jews of New York, popular on the stage since the 90s, has been the dialect most cultivated by American comic writers, e.g., Arthur Kober, Leo Calvin Rosten (Leonard Q. Ross) and Milt Gross.2 It has been studied by Robert J. Menner,3 Dolores Benardete,1 C. K. Thomas,2 Robert Sonkin3 and Alter Brody.4 Menner says that Gross’s transcription is as accurate “as our poor alphabet will allow.” One of the chief marks of the dialect is its change of the short i, as in bit, to the long e, as in beet, and vice versa. Says Menner:
Gross makes his Mrs. Feitlebaum say seex for six, dees for this, deesh for dish, and keetchen for kitchen … but on the other hand he writes quin for queen, itting for eating, stimhitt for steamheat, weesit for visit, spitch for speech, and keeds for kids.… When the baby sleeps (slips) on the floor he is put “queek in de bad should go to slip (sleep).” Mrs. Feitelbaum’s neighbor gives her child a peel (pill) when he eats up all the potato-pills. Now, if she uses long e incorrectly in slip and peel why can’t she utter the sound where it properly belongs in sleep and peel? The real reason is that Mrs. Feitelbaum and her friends do not actually reverse these sounds. In both slip and sleep they use a sound which may be loosely ascribed as midway between short i and long e. For in their native Yiddish, presumably, they have not the exact equivalent of either. Our popular designations disguise the close relationship between short i and long e. To the phonetician, as to the Continental, both are varieties of an i-sound. In phonetic terms Mrs. Feitelbaum’s i is probably a high-point tense ee shorter than the English ee in sleep, and yet not slack like the i in slip.… But if Gross’s symbols are not phonetically exact, they nevertheless reproduce exactly the effect on the ordinary hearer of the Yiddish attempt to pronounce our vowels.
In the same way and for the same reason the speaker of this dialect confuses and interchanges the sound of e in bed and that of a in bad, so that rang becomes reng and hat becomes het. Again, the o of don’t and the u of run are exchanged, so that don’t becomes dunt and punch becomes ponch. Miss Benardete lists the following additional vowel changes: the au-sound in mouth becomes the a-sound of mark or the o-sound of bow, so that down becomes dahn and now becomes no; the o-sound of not is so shortened that it comes close to the u-sound of cup, so that was sounds like vus; the au-sound in Maud also turns into a kind of u, so that yourself is yuself and because is bikus; the u-sound of cup becomes an a-sound, so that such is sahtsh and up is ahp, and the vowel in her is changed to oi, so that girl is goil and worth is woith. Among the consonants v is changed to f,w to v, v to w, d and the th of bath to t, the th of that to d, and g to k.
In their valuable handbook for character actors1 Lew and Marguerite Shalett Herman describe all of the foregoing traits of the dialect, along with a number of others. In the initial position, they say, d is pronounced as in English, but in the medial position it changes to t, as in rettesh (radish), and at the end of a word, if preceded by another consonant, it is commonly dropped, as in kain (kind). The k that is substituted for g in the medial and terminal positions varies with the birthplace of the speaker: the German Jews make its sound that of gk, but the Eastern Jews use a plain k. In the initial position it remains g. J is often converted into tch, as in tchahtch for judge. In the combination ng the g is often sounded more clearly than by Americans, so that singer rhymes precisely with finger. At the beginning of a word r is usually pronounced correctly, but on occasion it may be preceded by the neutral vowel, so that ribbon becomes uhreeb’n. In the medial position, when followed by a vowel and another consonant, it is omitted, as in pok for park, but when followed by a vowel alone it is always sounded, as in breenk (bring). In the terminal position it is always dropped. The Lithuanian Jews, say the Hermans, have difficulty with sh and tch. The former is usually unvoiced, so that fish becomes fees, and the latter is reduced to ts, so that bachelor becomes betseleh. Most of the grammatical and syntactical peculiarities of Yiddish-American are common to the vulgar speech of the whole country, e.g., the confusion of tenses, the use of to lay for to lie, the chronic misuse of shall and will and the substitution of what for that, as in “The girl what I seen.” But it also has some aberrations of its own, e.g., the substitution of stood for stayed, as in “He stood in bed”; the addition of an unnecessary auxiliary, as in “Did the work was did?”; the inversion of subject and predicate, as in “Was coming many peoples”; the omission of of, as in “Three kinds meat”; the use of might for maybe, as in “Might he will come”; the omission of there, as in “Is two men on the corner?” the substitution of by for at, as in “I was by his house”; the use of as following better, and the use of mine for my.2
Thomas’s study is devoted to the speech of educated Jews in New York. He says that one of its chief characteristics is a slight change in tongue position in the pronunciation of t, d, n, l, s and z, producing the effect of a lisp. This lisp is even more noticeable in the speech of English Jews, and writers who attempt to transcribe that speech usually indicate it.1 Brody, unlike Menner, is not content with the manner of rendering Yiddish-American followed by American writers. He does not mention Gross, but he is critical of Glass, and also of Anzia Yezierska, Myra Kelly and Bruno Lessing, whom he accuses of writing what he calls Yidgin English. His chief complaint is that, when a Yiddish preposition corresponds to two prepositions in English, they seek exotic color by translating it into the wrong one. An example is provided by froon (Ger. von), which may mean either of or from. Miss Yezierska makes it from, as in “God from the world,” whereas of is correct. Brody thus translates II Samuel XVIII, 33:
Oi weh! Mine son Absalom, Absalom mine son! God from the world! Better from far already I should have died, only if not he!
And thus Mark XIV, 36:
Oi weh! So tired I am from the neart, till I could die! Mine Father from Heaven, everything it could be by You! So make it maybe I shouldn’t have this bitter cup to
drink!
Beginning August 26, 1933 J.X.J. (John J. Holzinger) published in the New Yorker a series of “Notes for an East Side Dictionary” which recorded amusingly some Yiddish-American pronunciations. A few examples:
Dub. A large receptacle for water, as in washdub.
Greens, v. Smiles broadly.
Kettle. Steers and cows; livestock.
Lift, v. Past tense of to live.
Locker. Beer which has been stored some months before it is used.
Mop. A gang, a crowd.
Putter. A fatty substance obtained from milk and cream by churning; as in pick putter-and-ache man.
Spit. Quickness in motion.2
But of all the racial dialects on exhibition in the United States the one that has got the most attention, both from the literati and from students of linguistics, is that of the Southern Negroes. Tremaine McDowell says1 that it made its first appearance in American fiction in Part I of Hugh Henry Brackenridge’s satirical novel, “Modern Chivalry: Containing the Adventures of Captain Farrago and Teague O’Regan, His Servant,” published in 1792,2 but it had been attempted in plays so early as 1775 and there were traces of it in other writings even before.3 One of the characters in “Modern Chivalry” is Cuff, an illiterate slave who discovers a petrified mocassin and is invited to Philadelphia to address the primeval scientificoes of the American Philosophical Society. A sample of his discourse:
De first man was de black a-man, and de first woman was de black a-woman: and get two tree children; de rain vasha dese, and de snow pleach, and de coula come brown, yella, coppa coula, and at the last quite fite, and de hair long; and da fal out vid van anoda, and van cash by de nose, an pull, so de nose come lang, sharp nose.
Obviously, this could not have been good reporting, for the is sometimes the and sometimes de, and is sometimes and and sometimes an, w is sometimes w and sometimes v, and r is sometimes elided and sometimes not. But it at least gave some hint of one of the characters that must have shown itself in ignorant Negro speech in those days as it has shown itself ever since, to wit, a simplified grammatical structure. The origins of that structure was thus described by Krapp:4
When the Negroes were first brought to America they could have known no English. Their usefulness as servants, however, required that some means of communication between master and slave should be developed. There is little likelihood that any masters exerted themselves to understand or to acquire the native language of the Negroes.… On the contrary, the white overlords addressed themselves in English to their black vassals.… This English … would be very much simplified – the kind some people employ when they talk to babies. It would probably have no tenses of the verb, no distinctions of case in nouns or pronouns, no marks of singular or plural. Difficult sounds would be eliminated, as they are in baby talk. Its vocabulary would be reduced to the lowest elements.… As the Negroes imported into America came from many unrelated tribes, speaking languages so different that one tribe could not understand the language of another, they themselves were driven to the use of this infantile English in speaking to one another.
The slaves, however, were not taught English by their white overlords but by the low-caste whites set over them as overseers and by the earlier comers of their own race. In Virginia, until the beginning of the Eighteenth Century, they worked side by side in the fields with white bond servants, and nearly everywhere else their management was entrusted to overseers who, in many cases, were former bond servants of non-English origin and in nearly all cases were either illiterate or next door to it. In another place1 Krapp suggests that the result must have been the development of a dialect comparable to Pidgin English or Beach-la-Mar, and that this dialect survives more or less in the Gullah of the sea islands of Georgia and South Carolina, to be noticed presently. But its vestiges are also to be found in the speech of the most ignorant Negroes of the inland regions, which still shows grammatical peculiarities seldom encountered in white Southern speech, however lowly, e.g., the confusion of persons, as in “I is,” “Do she?,” “Does you?,” “Am you de man,” and “He am”;2 the frequent use of present forms in the past, as in “He been die,” and “He done show me,” and the tendency to omit all the forms of to be, as in “He gone” and “Where you at?.”3 The phonology of this mudsill Negro speech greatly resembles that of the lowest class of whites, so much so that many competent observers, among them Southerners, have declared that it is substantially identical,4 but my own belief, after a lifetime spent in contact with Negroes of all classes, is that in intonation, at least, it shows special characters.1 Even the educated Negro seldom loses this intonation, though in vocabulary and pronunciation his speech is identical with that of the corresponding class of whites.2 Indeed, he tends to speak a shade “better,” in the schoolma’am’s sense, than whites on his own level, and it has been noted by more than one observer that in New York City, for example, the colored people seldom use foist and the other hallmarks of the so-called Brooklyn dialect. The representation of Negro speech in literature has always been imperfect, and often absurd. A familiar example is afforded by the brer of Joel Chandler Harris’s stories. No Southern Negro ever actually uses brer. What he says, when he attempts brother, is something on the order of bruh-uh or bruh, maybe with a faint trace of r at the end.3
The Gullah or Geechee dialect of the Georgia and South Carolina coasts4 is an anomaly among American Negro dialects, as it is indeed among American dialects in general, for it is the only one that is not easily intelligible in far parts of the country. Krapp was of the opinion that “very little of it, perhaps none, is derived from sources other than English,” and not a few white linguists have supported him,1 but this theory has now been considerably weakened by the studies of Dr. Lorenzo D. Turner, of Fisk University, a Negro linguist who prepared himself for his task by acquiring a working knowledge of the principal West Coast African languages. He began field work between Georgetown, S. C. and the Georgia-Florida border in 1930, and by 1944 had assembled no less than 6,000 loans from twenty-eight languages and dialects. Of these about a thousand came from Kongo, spoken in Angola and the Belgian Congo, and another thousand from Yoruba, spoken in Nigeria. About four-fifths of them appear today only as personal names, and others are used only in traditional African songs, mostly unintelligible to the singers, but the rest “are used daily in conversation.”2 Some of Turner’s specimens from the surviving vocabulary follow, with the African terms from which they come:
Agali. Welcome. (Wolof agali).
Ban. It is done. (Vai and Bambara ban, to be finished).
Beng, or bing. A rabbit. (Fante kping).
Bong. A tooth. (Wolof bong).
Bubu. Any insect, but usually one whose sting is poisonous. (Fula mbubu, a fly; Hausa, bubuwa; Bambara, buba; Kongo mbu).
Bukra. A white man. (Efik and Ibibio mbakara, white man, from mba, he who, and kara, to govern).
Da, or dada. Mother. (Ewe da or dada).
Daf. Corn cooked in cakes. (Hausa dafwwa, boiled corn or rice).
Dajije. Sleep well. (Twi dajije).
Det. A hard rain. (Wolof det).
Dindi. A small child. (Vai din din).
Do. A child. (Mende ndo).
Dzadza, or dzagdza. A blackbird. (Mende dzadzalo).
Dzambi. A red sweet potato. (Vai dzambi).
Dziga. A sand flea. (Yoruba, Wolof, Mandinka and Hausa dziga).
Dzoga. A seesaw. (Wolof dzogal, to rise).
Enufole. Pregnant. (Ewe fo le enu, she is with child).
Fufu. A powder used to cast a spell. (Ewe fufu, dust).
Fukfuk. The viscera of an animal. (Mende fukfuk).
Fulafafa. A woodpecker. (Mende fula, to bore through; fafa, a small tree).
Gafa, or kafa. Rice. (Hausa shinkafa).
Guba. A peanut. (Kongo nguba, a kidney).
Gumbo. Okra. (Tshiluba tshinguhmbuh; Umbundu otshingumbo).
Hudu, v. To bring bad luck to. (Hausa hudu, a form of gambling; Ewe hododo, lending or b
orrowing; hodada, a dice game).
Ibi, v. To vomit. (Yoruba ibi).
Kunu. A boat. (Bambara kunu).
Kuta. A tortoise. (Bambara and Malinke kuta; Dahomean kulo; Efik ikut; Buluba-Lulua nkudu; Djerma ankura; Hausa kunkura).
Landu, or dalandu. An alligator. (Kongo ngandu, a crocodile; Hausa lando, a lizard; Bobangi landa, to glide or move along).
Na. And. (Twi and Ibo na).
Nanse. A spider. (Twi and Fante ananse).
Nuna. A term of respect used in addressing an old woman. (Mandinka nna; Kongo and Bobangi nuna; Buluba-Lulua nunu).
Nyamnyam, or nyam, v. To eat. (Wolof nyanmyam).
Podzo, or odzo. A heron. (Mende podzo).
So so. A call to horses. (Vai, Mende and Jeji so, a horse).
Toko. Plenty. (Twi toko, plentifully; Dahomean togogo, overflowing).
Tot, v. To carry. (Umbundu tuta, to carry; Kikongo tota, to pick up; Mandingo ta, to carry on the head or in the hand).
Ula. A louse or bedbug. (Umbundu ola or ona, a louse; ula, a bed; Yoruba ola, a moth).
Vudu. Sorcery. (Dahomean vodu, a spirit or fetish; vodudoho, a curse; vuduna, a cult or religion; Ewe vodu da, a snake that is worshipped; vodusi, a priest).
Wanga. A charm. (Umbundu owanga, a charm or fetish).
Yan, v. To tell a lie (Wolof yan).
Some of these have got into the general American vocabulary, especially in the South, e.g., buckra, gumbo, dzambi (yam), dziga (chigger), vudu (voodoo), hudu (hoodoo), guba (goober) and kuta (cooter). It is possible also that kunu may have been the progenitor of canoe and tot of to tote, though it does not appear to be likely.1 Other investigators, all working before Turner, sought to show that Gullah is simply an archaic form of English, strongly influenced by the British dialects, including Scots, and also by French. Bennett, before cited2 compiled a list of Elizabethan and even earlier survivals in its vocabulary and phonology, and came to the conclusion that it comes closer to the dialect of Lancashire than to any other English dialect.3 Arthur A. Norton, reporting on a trip to the South Carolina coast in 1898, professed to find it “nearly similar to the broken English of the French-Canadians.”1 And Reed Smith, writing in 1926,2 saw its genesis in “the English vocabulary as spoken on the coast by the white inhabitants from about 1700 on.” What the Negroes did, he goes on, was to take “a sizeable part” of that vocabulary,
American Language Supplement 2 Page 32