US: why German ancestry never made German the country's language

The largest European ancestry in the US doesn't speak its language

The thesis sounds provocative: if Germans were the largest European source of settlers in the United States, why does the founding country speak English and not German? The short answer is that ethnicity doesn't build nations; the institutional software gets installed first. The founding documents were written in English, and the legal, educational and administrative apparatus was born British. Later waves adapted to that skeleton, no matter how massive they were.

The initial premise itself claims that the WASP are, in fact, Germans speaking English, and that after independence a German flood arrived that forgot its language as quickly as it declared war on its country of origin in both world wars. The symmetry is elegant. It is also misleading, because it confuses the origin of the blood with the origin of the rules.

How many Americans have German ancestry?

The data used in the discussion itself disproves the strong premise. English origin accounts for around 46.6 million people, roughly 14%; German stands at 45 million, 13.5%. Behind them come the Irish with 38.6 million and the Mexican with 35.8. The white majority is no longer of German origin, and probably never was in absolute terms. Some add that Hispanics total 65 million in ancestry and African Americans 40 million, which reshuffles any ethnic narrative of the country.

Even so, the German weight is enormous. It is noted that by the 18th century 100,000 Germans had already arrived, the origin of the so-called Pennsylvania Dutch and the Amish, and that before that century ended they made up 8.7% of the population. Benjamin Franklin viewed that tide with suspicion in his 1753 essay, complaining that they were too insular and that there were too many of them.

The German spoken at home that disappeared

There was a time when German was the country's unofficial second language. German schools, newspapers, churches. All of it was anglicized or died out, and the two world wars accelerated the process until it was pushed to the margins. What survives are residual pockets: the Amish with their Pennsylvania dialect, the Mennonites with Plautdietsch. The figures vary depending on the criterion: 8 or 9 million speakers with some competence versus 1.5 million who use it as their main language at home.

Linguistic assimilation was brutal, and not by decree, but by social incentive. The language of school, court and contract was English. Learning it was the path to advancement; keeping German was a liability in times of suspicion.

The Argentine case: Italians who didn't speak Italian

The parallel with Argentina sheds light on the mechanism. Most of the Italians who arrived in that South American country didn't speak Italian: they spoke their own dialects. Italy was unified in the second half of the 19th century, and the language based on Tuscan was imposed much later, with Mussolini spreading it across the peninsula. Each region brought its own tongue, and to understand one another they resorted to Spanish. Hence the nickname "tanos" and the Sicilian anecdote about Italian teachers mistaken for English teachers.

Something similar peine with German: what we today call standard German is a relatively late construction built on dozens of dialects that were mutually unintelligible. The migrant didn't bring a national language; they brought their local variant.

The Norman conquest and the founding narrative

The thread ventures into more speculative territory: the idea that the Anglo-Saxon defeat of 1066 was universalized as a prospective defeat of biology, and that the Normans sculpted the Anglo-Saxon race. Castles are cited as images of Norman grandeur, and there is talk of American biological parasitism on other nations, with German-Americans as the final losers of the wars between cousins. These are suggestive readings, with no documentary support in the discussion, best taken as hypotheses rather than proven history.

The mistake of confusing ancestry with founding culture

The most solid explanation is the simplest: the legal, administrative, educational and power structure was established in English by British settlers. That is the base software. The arrival of massive waves of Germans afterwards doesn't change the operating system; they adapt to the existing environment. A people can change its ethnic majority without changing its town hall, its school or its neighborhood.

The lobby that promoted National Socialism among emigrated Germans was a minority, and its public acts were counter-protested by tens of thousands of people. There was no mass movement to Germanize the country. The question, then, is not why they don't speak German, but why anyone expected them to.