Professor Born's book provides a phonological, grammatical, and lexical description of a German-American dialect that has never before been studied. It compares the Michigan Frankenmuth dialect with its parent dialect in central Franconia.
The town of Frankenmuth was established in 1845 by an unusually homogeneous group of orthodox Lutherans bent on remaining separate from the American mainstream. The settlement history was therefore a significant factor in postponing the shift to American English in Frankenmuth until the middle of this century.
This study will be of interest to scholars and students of dialectology, contrastive dialectology, and sociolinguistics.