Language revival

Class at Kutztown U. is creating more speakers of Pennsylvania German.

November 08, 2006|By Genevieve Marshall Of The Morning Call

Zachary Anthony, a senior at Pleasant Valley High School, wants to be able to talk easily in Pennsylvania German with his 95-year-old great-grandmother.

But the dialect is spoken only by a few of his older relatives, and his father, Ray Anthony, never learned it well, so he never taught his son.

"Grammy and Pappy used to speak it at the dinner table so my father and their kids wouldn't understand what they were saying," said Zachary, of Kunkletown. "I'd really like to speak it fluently."

At 17, Zachary is the youngest student in a Pennsylvania German class at the Pennsylvania German Cultural Heritage Center on the campus of Kutztown University. There are a few students at his school who know some words, and he wants to know more than them.

"It's kind of cool, to be able to speak something few people know anymore," he said.

Paul Kunkel, 80, has taught classes like this one for more than three decades. Until recently, most of his students were senior citizens.


Ray Anthony, 46, is closer to the ages of the other students, most of whom are between 40 and 60 years old. Like Ray Anthony, a tool and die maker from Kunkletown, many of the students had parents or grandparents who spoke the dialect fluently, but for one reason or another, didn't pass it on to the next generation.

They all said they want to learn to speak, read and write in a dialect that, outside of Amish and Mennonite communities, is only heard in places such as Renninger's antique market in Kutztown, at fer-sommling dinners and Grundsow Lodges, a Pennsylvania German fraternal organization.

"This is the generation that never learned to speak the dialect because their parents didn't know it or didn't want them to know it," Kunkel said.

Pennsylvania German, more commonly known as Pennsylvania Dutch, dialect originated in the southwest part of Germany along the Rhine River and migrated to America with German immigrants as early as 1683, Kunkel said.

For about past six years, Kunkel has been teaching the class in a one-room schoolhouse that is part of the heritage center complex. Beginning just after Labor Day, the 14-week class runs from 7-9 p.m. every Monday. There are about 20 students in the class.

The schoolhouse feels like a museum, with a nonworking coal stove in the center and a pipe organ no one is allowed to touch. Students sit at hard-backed wooden desks and go over sentence structure, vocabulary and grammar in Pennsylvania German.

Matthew Sicher, 25, and his wife, Jesse Tobin, also 25, want to teach their future children to speak Pennsylvania German. First, the Albany Township couple need to learn it themselves.

They are more advanced than many of their classmates because they already speak "high German" to varying degrees -- Tobin is fluent. Recently they attended a fersommling dinner to practice conversing in the dialect.

"This is our investment in keeping the language and culture alive," said Sicher, a woodworker and child behavioral therapist. "We want to protect our heritage."

Monday was their ninth class. Students practiced counting from 1 to 100 so they could learn all of the guttural sounds in the language. They also had to say their birthdays and translate sentences they probably will never use, such as: "The hog trough is full of cold water."

A student recalled that his father used to call in the hogs by yelling, "Wutz, wutz, wutz."

Kunkel said that when used to describe a trough, the word for hog is "Sei," and it's capitalized because it is a noun.

Die Sei Drog us voll mitt Kalt Wasser , Kunkel wrote on the blackboard over the incorrect translation.

"I haven't been to school in decades," said David Heffner, a satellite technician from Lenhartsville who diligently tape records each lesson. "It's just as hard to memorize and find the time to study as it was in high school and college."

Heffner, 58, goes to class with his wife, Genevieve. They both know some words -- he learned some from his grandfather -- but his parents never taught him because they wanted to be able to talk about him within earshot.

"I picked up a few words here and there, but I want to be able to write it and speak it well," Heffner said. "I want to do everything correctly, rather than all hodgepodge."

Kunkel also had to learn the language covertly.

"My mother didn't want me to have a "dumb Dutch' accent," said Kunkel, who was born and raised in Kutztown. "She forbade the neighbors and relatives from speaking it around my sister and myself."

Kunkel's mother had four brothers who all went to college and became teachers. She saw how hard it was for them to find jobs with their strong accents and didn't want her own children to face the same discrimination.

He didn't begin learning the dialect until he was a teenager. When his father heard him repeating Pennsylvania German swear words he picked up in the grocery store, he secretly taught Kunkel the dialect while they worked together on cars in the garage.

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