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[–]Countach_3D 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Did you know there were so many native german speakers in America at one point that a vote had to be held to see what would be the national language and English only just won. You could be speaking / writing German right now if the vote had of gone the other way.

As a language lover I must debunk this urban myth. The vote was only about federal funding for official translations of government documents, the same way many jurisdictions have Spanish versions of informational pamphlets and voting ballots today.

That said, up until the First World War a large number of proud Americans went to school in German, did their shopping in German, raised their children in German, and there was a thriving German-language press. (The publisher of the first German newspaper in the New World? A certain "B. Francklin" [sic].) The most American author ever, Mark Twain, was proud of his second language and wrote a few short stories and speeches in it.

What the U.S. did to German, and ethnic Germans - its own citizens - during the virulent xenophobia of the World Wars, effectively wiping out a language in a generation, is a tragedy, one today unknown by most Americans, of German descent and not.