Cheyenne Transporter

THE PENNSYLVANIA DUTCH.

A Class of Natives that Speak a Different Language.

Buffalo Courier.

Dauphin County, Pa., in this great America of ours and in the very heart of its oldest and highest civilization there are whole communities whose present inhabitants, as well as their ancestors for a century past, were born where they now reside, and yet are almost entire strangers to the English language. Hundreds and even thousands of them not being able to speak or understand a word of it. Take the counties of York, Lancaster, Lehigh, Berks, the northern half of Bucks and the southern half of Dauphin, besides several other counties of the state, and four-fifths of the people will be found to entirely ignore the English language among themselves, and in many communities the English-speaking traveler will scarcely be able to find any one to whom he can make himself understood, certainly no women.

These people are what are known as Pennsylvania Dutch. They have no written language, their speech being simply a dialect, the only analogy of which with anything else of human antecedents lies in the fact that an occasional English, German, French, or Spanish word has been sandwiched with strange discordance into it. A great number of the people are bitterly opposed to their children's learning to speak English, and if allowed to go to school at all, it is to a private one with a Dutch teacher, and even at the public schools, where of course, English is taught, the children relapse into their native jargon upon the play ground as was observed by the writer while passing a country school-house only a few days ago. In fact in passing through this entire section of central Pennsylvania the ordinary American will find his surroundings, as regards both language and the social customs of the people, just as strange and foreign to his ideas as though he were in Westphalia or Norway.

And not only this, but he will find that he is looked upon with the same degree of half-suspicious curiosity and as being as much of an interloper as would be the case in the foreign countries mentioned. This condition of things embraces a territory of many thousands of square miles on the very finest sections of this great commonwealth and a population of more than 300,000 people in the very heart of our civilization. The masses of the southern people have ever labored under the impression that during the late unpleasantness our army was very largely recruited from foreign countries. This view has been held up to the writer on innumerable occasions and made to explain our ability to place such overwhelming armies in the field. This belief arose from the frequent capture of these Pennsylvania Dutchmen, who could not in many cases speak English, and in their contact with several regiments of troops raised in this region. And yet the ancestors of these soldiers for generations back were born upon this soil. In fact, so far as the matter can be traced, this language is indigenous to this section, as no people using the same or a similar dialect are known anywhere else on the face of the earth. The native Hollander, be he of either high or low Dutch origin can no more understand the people here than can the ordinary American. As a rule they are not an agreeable people to mingle with either in business dealings or in social intercourse. Ignorance, selfishness, and greed are their governing traits.