Languages of Ethnicity: Teaching German in Waterloo County's Schools, 1850–1915

The German-language classroom in the public schools of Waterloo County, Ontario, thrust the local ethnicity of the region into the public eye and provoked public conversations on the meaning of the German language and its importance to cultural identity. Ethnic leaders vocally sought to preserve their mother tongue in its ancestral "purity" and to boost enrolment in German-language programmes in the schools. Yet the languages of ethnicity in Waterloo County were not bound by the standard German that ethnic leaders sought to perpetuate as the only legitimate expression of the mother tongue. Rather, a local language that infused German with English phrases, syntax, words, and idiom remained a medium of communication well into the twentieth century. This fluid new medium —"pidgin" German, as ethnic leaders derisively called it —reflected the cultural hybrid that was Waterloo County.