Language loyalty in the German-American Church: the Case of an
Over-confident Minority  Harold Schiffman South Asia Studies
University of Pennsylvania  Handout for LING 540, Language
Policy  (A shorter version of this paper has been published as
``Losing the Battle for Balanced Bilingualism: The German-
American Case." in J. Pool (ed.), Linguistic Inequality. Special
Issue of Language Problems and Language Planning (Vol 11, No. 1,
Spring, 1987). pp. 66-81.)  next up previous Next: References
The purpose of this paper is to examine linguistic assimilation
in two denominations of the German-American church based on
evidence from language policy in schools operated by those
denominations. An analysis of this policy and the resultant
assimilation to English demonstrates how a minority such as the
German-Americans, who operated a large and sophisticated private
German-language school system (how German it actually was I will
examine in more detail later) nevertheless found that this
effort did not succeed in prese