ABSTRACT
Although the first Germans began to arrive in Pennsylvania in 1683, mass immigration did not take place until the 1720s. From the first settlement at Germantown, east of Philadelphia, the colonists spread into southeastern Pennsylvania, that is, the counties of Lancaster, Lehigh, Bucks, Berks and others. From the middle of the eighteenth century on, a southward expansion into parts of Maryland, North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia and West Virginia took place, along with continuing migration into western Pennsylvania, the Mohawk Valley of New York, and southern Ontario, Canada. Finally, the nineteenth century carried German colonists westward into Ohio, Indiana, and beyond into many regions of the Americas. At the tum of this century, some 750,000 persons used Pennsylvania German in their daily life: 600,000 of them lived in the state of Pennsylvania.
