A Myth Exploded

One of the more intractable myths of this period is that Congress (or the Constitutional Convention itself) considered adopting German as the national language. The story has been repeated so often, by so many respectable writers, that it has nearly attained the status of received wisdom*). So let me say this clearly: it is wholly without foundation. In 1789, 90 per cent of America’s four million inhabitants were of English descent. The idea that they would in an act of petulance impose on themselves a foreign tongue is clearly risible, The only known occasion on which German was ever an issue was in 1795 when the House of Representatives briefly considered a proposal to publish federal laws in German as well as in English as a convenience to recent immigrants and the proposal was defeated. Indeed, as early as 1778, the Continental Congress decreed that messages to foreign emissaries be issued ‘in the language of the United States’. 

*) Here, for instance, is Kingsley Amis: “An early Congress of the United States debated what language the new nation was to speak. English symbolized the vanquished colonial oppressor, its sole virtue being that everyone used it. As so many of us know, it won the contest, narrowly beating German. There were also votes - not many—for Ancient Greek, as the language of the first democracy, and for a Red Indian language, perhaps Massachusetts or Cree, because it was American.”
                                                                                                                    Bill Bryson. Made in America, p. 72

                                                            Pennsylvania Dutch

Only one group has managed to resist in significant numbers the temptations of English. I refer to the speakers of the curious dialect that is known generally, if mistakenly, as Pennsylvania Dutch. The name is an accident of history. From the early eighteenth century to almost the end of the nineteenth, Dutch in American English was applied not just to the language of Holland and its environs, but to much else that was bewilderingly foreign, most especially the German language - doubtless in confusion with the German word ‘Deutsch’.
   The Germans came to Pennsylvania at the invitation of William Penn, who believed that their ascetic religious principles fitted comfortably with his own Quaker beliefs. The German influx, eventually comprising about 100,000 people, or a third of Pennsylvania’s population, was made up of a variety of loosely related sects, notably Mennonites, Schwenkenfelders, Dunkards, Moravians and Amish, but it was the Amish in particular who spoke the Palatinate dialect of High German that eventually evolved into the tongue that most know as Pennsylvania Dutch. To the Pennsylvania Dutch the language is called Muddersrschprooch. To scholars and the linguistically fastidious it is Pennsylvania German.

                                                                                                                    Bill Bryson, Made in America, p.174