There were a lot of these elements in my house, and especially my grandparents’ when I was growing up. Makes me a little nostalgic. I’m gonna go eat some dippy eggs (no scrapple, please) and bake a shoo-fly pie.
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I’m no expert, but I do know that there are many immigrants from both Brazil and Portugal in Boston. I suspect the presence of the language is only due to them, and not a vestige of the 18th and 19th century migrations.
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Right. Third place doesn’t imply anything about the number of speakers, other than >0.
IIRC, the census question is “what languages are spoken in your home” or similar. So, it could mean we speak English 99% of the time, but high school German (or whatever) when we don’t want the dog to understand.
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I suspect they’re largely lumping Mandarin and Cantonese together for simplicity’s sake, and because splitting them up would make Chinese languages overall seem less prevalent. I believe that in New York, for example, our original waves of Chinese immigrants (those who created the original Chinatown in Manhattan) were Cantonese speakers, whereas these days most are coming from different regions of China and speak Mandarin. So we have a mix of both. Nonetheless, I suppose it’s interesting to know that together they make up our 3rd-biggest language group.
At least for Massachusetts, it’s certainly Brazilian. There’s a very large Brazilian population in the metro Boston area.
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The Midwest, sure, but I thought the Mountain West was largely unavailable at that time.
I found some good info on this: https://www.immigrationresearch.org/system/files/Portuguese_speakers.pdf
What surprised me is that it’s not just Brazilians and and Portuguese, but Cape Verdeans and Azoreans as well!
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Very true, but not just Mandarin! My old 'hood in Manhattan is filled with Fujianese
Depends what time you mean, exactly… settlement of the Mountain West (by white people) basically picked up at the end of the civil war, thought of course it was complicated over the 2nd half of the 19th century by the objections of the people who already lived there.
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It’s the mountains.
Very cool. What strikes me about that write-up is that it implies that there is a certain amount of continuity in the migration of Portugese-speakers to MA over all this time - in other words, maybe it’s not just a coincidence that they continue to head towards Boston, of all places, but that to some degree the tradition of movement to New England has roots in the earlier migrations? Maybe. Suppose you’d have to ask some Azoreans to be sure, but interesting nonetheless.
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Yeah, I think you’re right about that. Fascinating stuff.
There are definitely a lot of Brazilians in Metro Boston. But Portugal has had cheap direct flights into Logan for a long time as well. I know a lot of Portuguese immigrants in Ludlow, MA for example, and also a bunch in New Bedford and down into the Newport area (Rhode Island at that point, but the spread all makes sense)
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Arabic in West Virginia?
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To further confuse things, the Dutch language is also named after Deutsch. Both Dutch and Pennsylvania Dutch are Germanic languages.
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Most definitely not. Those states had very large German immigrant populations (a lot of farmers & farm-related stuff, because they were very good farmers) in the 19th century. There were a lot of communities that spoke German as the primary language, and had German language newspapers and schooling up until the 1910’s, and then that whole WWI business made it a little less kosher to be speaking German primarily, with WWII accelerating that trend.
At this point, I suspect that the remaining German speakers include a lot of Hutterite/Mennonite/Amish folks speaking some version of Low German or Pennsylvania German
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Maybe, but I’ve never heard of “Idaho German” being a thing, whereas “Idaho Nazi” is very, very much a thing.
Most likely they aren’t listed as separate languages on federal forms and surveys.
It doesn’t seem like it’s terribly hidden, though. Per Wikipedia:
Many German farmers settled in what is now Idaho at the same time. German settlers were primarily Lutheran across all of the midwest and west, including Idaho, however there were small numbers of Catholics amongst them as well. In parts of Northern Idaho, German remained the dominant language until World War I, when German-Americans were pressured to convert entirely to English. Today, Idahoans of German ancestry make up nearly one fifth of all Idahoans and make up the second largest ethnic group after Idahoans of English descent with people of German ancestry being 18.1% of the state and people of English ancestry being 20.1% of the state.
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Seems strange that the kind of people who want you to “speak 'Murican” would bother to learn German.
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