Kansas, German Dialects in
The various German dialects found in the state of Kansas predominantly reflect the massive influx of German-speaking settlers from German-speaking Europe and Russia who immigrated to the state during the period from the mid-1850s to the 1880s.
Many of these early settlers were attracted to Kansas by the Kansas Pacific and Santa Fe railroad companies. Both companies undertook massive recruitment efforts to attract settlers to the lands available along the railroad lines. Other groups speaking a German-based dialect migrated to Kansas in the last half of the twentieth century and early years of the twenty-first. For example, Yiddish-speaking Jews (post-World War II) are found in metropolitan areas such as Kansas City, Wichita, and Topeka; and migrant farm workers from Mennonite colonies in Mexico who entered the state in the last quarter century began to establish settlements in southwestern Kansas. The German settlements in Kansas offer a window on the full spectrum of German dialects, from the Low German dialects spoken from the Dutch border in northern Germany to the Vistula Delta ofWest Prussia to the Upper German dialects of Switzerland and Bavaria, as well as varieties of German that emerged in colonial settlements, whether in Russia or in Pennsylvania.Dialects from Upper German dialect regions are found in both northeastern and west-central Kansas. Swiss German enclave dialects exist in the community of Bern in Nemaha County. Beginning in the 1880s, a number of German-speaking immigrants from the Austrian settlements in Bukovina, on the eastern slopes of the Carpathian Mountains, began settling in west-central Kansas. They settled in the counties of Ellis, Trego, and Rooks, with the town of Ellis as the center. The immigrants to west-central Kansas have traditionally called themselves Swabian or Bohemian Germans, although they were commonly referred to as Austrians.
They came from Bukovina, but did not originate there. The Lutheran Swabians came from southwest Germany, whereas the Catholic Bohemian Germans came from western Bohemia. The Lutheran Swabians settled north of the city of Ellis, whereas the Catholic Bohemian Germans built their homesteads south of Ellis. Linguistically, one must differentiate between two groups of Bukovina Germans: the Lutheran Swabians, who speak a Palatine (Middle German) type of dialect from southwest Germany, and the Catholic Bohemian Germans, whose dialect derivesfrom the area of the Bohemian Forest in the western part of the former Austro- Hungarian Empire. This dialect mainly shows features of Central Bavarian with some North Bavarian characteristics. For example, the vocalization of the postvocalic /r/, which leads to a diphthongization of the preceding vowel, is a typical characteristic shared by both Ellis County Bohemian German and Central Bavarian dialects. A study of the lexical items of Ellis County Bohemian German also supports an original location of the dialect in the area of the uppercentral and lower-upper Bohemian Forest.
German American speech islands in Kansas exhibiting a Middle German dialectal heritage abound. In south-central Kansas, the Schweitzer Mennonite di- alect—a Western Palatine dialect—can be found in Moundridge (McPherson County). The misnomer “Schweizerisch” stems from the fact that the ancestors of these Mennonites originally came from the canton of Bern, Switzerland. Their home was in the northern Palatinate, however, from 1670 to 1797. During this time, their High Alemannic Bernese was virtually completely replaced by a Palatine dialect. The formation of the past participle with loss of final —en is a characteristic feature of Western Palatine dialects (the area from which these Mennonites stem) and appears in the speech of the Schweitzer Mennonite dialect.
The Volga German dialects found in and around Ellis County, Kansas, also represent a Middle German dialect speech island.
They represent a German-language speech enclave that separated from the main body of German dialects and established itself along the southern Volga River in the districts of Samara and Saratov in Russia during the reign of Catherine the Great in the second half of the eighteenth century. After a century in Russia, many Volga Germans chose to emigrate again to the Americas in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. In the area of Ellis County, Kansas, many intradialectal differences exist between the various Volga German communities. For example, the communities of Schoenchen, Munjor, Pfeifer (Ellis County), and Liebenthal (Rush County) exhibit many characteristics common to the area in and southwest of Frankfurt (South Hessian). The dialect spoken in Herzog (now known as Victoria) is categorized as West Palatine and the dialect of Catharine is described as descended from a West Middle German Stadtmundart, similar to its namesake on the Volga. Many of the original immigrants to Russia had no agricultural background and had to learn farming through trial and error. Although the Volga Germans lived in closed communities separate from the Russian peasantry, the influence of their Slavic neighbors nevertheless had some impact on the vocabulary: erbus ’’watermelon,” pachshu “garden,” blotnik “carpenter,” bklazhan “tomato,” etc.No story of Middle German dialectal variants in Kansas would be complete without mentioning Pennsylvania German. A handful of Pennsylvania German families came to Kansas in the late 1850s. It is believed that the majority of Pennsylvania German migrations from Pennsylvania to Kansas took place between 1854 and 1920, although exact statistics do not exist. Pennsylvania German communities can be found today in Anderson, Douglas, and Harvey counties. German Catholics from the Rhineland (near Cologne) and Luxembourg occupy northwestern Segwick County in and around the communities of Andale, Colwich, Ost, St. Mark, and Garden Plain.
As can be expected, the dialect spoken in this area is a variation of Mosel- frankisch. After the end of World War II, Yiddish-speaking Jews immigrated to the United States. Yiddish, which predominantly represents a Middle German dialect slightly altered by Slavic and Hebrew influences, is spoken today in the metropolitan areas of Kansas City, Wichita, and Topeka.Low German—speaking immigrants also found their way to Kansas in strong numbers. In Marshall and Washington counties, the Missouri Synod Lutheran settlers of Hanover, Marysville, and Bremen speak East Low German, characterized by a unified plural ending on present tense verbs: -et. Mennonite Low German (Plautdietsch) is spoken in Haskell, Marion, McPherson, and Reno counties. The first major movement of Mennonites from Russia took place in the 1870s. Migrants from the Molotschna community settled in Minnesota, Nebraska, and Kansas. Two linguistic characteristics that classify the Molotschna dialect and that are also found in Kansas Mennonite Low German are: the common /?/ (schwa) ending on infinitives and the palatalization of /k/ and /t/. Since as early as the 1970s, Low German—speaking immigrants have been moving to southwest Kansas (Grant, Gray Haskell, and Meade counties) from the state of Chihuahua in Mexico. These immigrants are Old Colony Mennonites who came to Mexico from Manitoba early in the twentieth century. They have come to Kansas to escape extreme poverty that they experienced in the Chihuahua region.
In the early twenty-first century the gradual linguistic decay of the last remnants of German settlement dialects in Kansas is apparent. In most communities, the oldest generation of speakers maintains some level of fluency; however, the younger members possess only marginal fluency at best. The major groups that continue to pass on a German dialect as a mother tongue are the Old Order Amish and Old Colony Mennonites. Faced with the eventual death of these German settlement dialects within the next quarter century, researchers in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Kansas have founded the Linguistic Atlas of Kansas German Dialects (LAKGD) Project.
The purpose of the LAKGD is to collect, preserve, and analyze German American dialects spoken in the state of Kansas and the midwestern United States. The LAKGD continues to make recordings of these dialects available via the World Wide Web and to acquire new dialect samples. The LAKGD can be found under the following URL: http://www.ku.edu∕~german∕lakgdhomepage∕main.htm.Michael T Putnam
See also Amish; Brazil; Lutheran Church- Missouri Synod; Pennsylvania German (Dutch) Language; Volga Germans (Volga Deutsche) in the United States
References and Further Reading
Epp, Reuben. The Story of Low German and Plautdietsch: Tracing a Language across the Globe. Hilsboro, KS: Reader’s, 1993.
Johnson, D. Chris. “The Volga German Dialect of Schoenchen, Kansas.” Doctoral Dissertation. University of Kansas, 1994.
Keel, William D. “On the Heimatbestimmung of the Ellis County (Kansas) VolgaGerman Dialects.” Yearbook for German- American Studies 17 (1982): 99—110.
Lunte, Gabriele M. The Catholic Bohemian German Dialect of Ellis, Kansas. Doctoral Dissertation. University of Kansas, 1998.
Schach, Paul. “Phonetic Change in German Dialects on the Great Plains.” Yearbook of German-American Studies 18 (1983): 157-173.