Translingual Inheritance by Elizabeth Kimball

Translingual Inheritance Language Diversity in Early National Philadelphia by Elizabeth Kimball University of Pittsburgh Press, 211 pp., hardcover $50 At the beginning of this book’s first chapter, the author poses the question, “What if we imagined a United States of America not in English?” This may call to mind the murky (and unfounded) legend about German and English supposedly competing...
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Pennsylvania Dutch by Mark L. Louden

Pennsylvania Dutch: The Story of an American Language by Mark L. Louden Johns Hopkins University Press, 504 pp., cloth $59.95 The controversy over the origins, identity and persistence of one of America’s most misunderstood minority languages has been positively settled by Louden’s unparalleled presentation of Pennsylvania Dutch, for which even the proper name has been the subject of...
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