Introduction

German presence in the USA dates back to colonial times. In 1608, German craftsmen, mostly carpenters, helped create the first American settlement in Jamestown. In 1683, thirteen families of Mennonites and Quakers arrived in Pennsylvania and created Germantown, the first German settlement in the USA (Faust 1912, II: 7). Many of the immigrants during these early days came for religious reasons. They continued to settle in Pennsylvania, but also in New Jersey, Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina and mainly came from the western part of today's Germany. Later, they came for economic reasons or were political refugees. They all brought their faith, their belief in hard work, and, of course, their language.

Today, more than 400 years later, the USA has the largest concentration of German speakers outside of Europe. According to the 2007 American Community Survey conducted by the US Census Bureau, German is the sixth most commonly spoken non-English language in the USA (Table 1.1), though the number of US German speakers declined by 11 percent between the 1990 Census and the 2000 Census, and by a further 20 percent between 2000 and 2007. This chapter presents a brief historical overview of German ancestry and language, as well as some demographic and recent immigration information, followed by some thoughts about the future of the German language in the USA.