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In:Varieties of German in Contact Settings: Studies in honor of William D. Keel
Edited by B. Richard Page and Michael T. Putnam
[Studies in Germanic Linguistics 10] 2025
► pp. 115–130

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Chapter 6
“And the cow jumped over … the fence?”

On the development and origin of a German American linguistic legend

 | University of Wisconsin–Madison
Published online: 27 November 2025
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https://doi.org/10.1075/sigl.10.06lo
Abstract
The most enduring stereotype of German American speech is expressed by variants of a sentence describing a cow or other animal jumping over a fence in which the matrix language is German and the words for ‘jump’ and ‘fence’ are borrowed from English. The underlying message is that German-English bilinguals produce gibberish. I document occurrences of the “fence-jumping animal legend” in popular and scholarly texts and identify its origin in the text of an apocryphal conversation between two German speakers in colonial Pennsylvania published in 1759. By comparing the language of the text with actual Pennsylvania Dutch (German), I show how it and the fence-jumping animal sentences it spawned are exaggerations of linguistic reality that are typical of linguistic urban legends.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The legend in German America and beyond
  • 3.Johann David Schöpf, the legend, and German in Pennsylvania
  • 4.Identifying and correcting the origin of the legend
  • 5.Discussion
  • Notes
  • References
References (19)
References
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