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 poda_t wrote:

 Hordini wrote:
Texas even has it's own German dialect, known appropriately as Texas German, so it kind of makes sense that Texas be the Bavaria of the USA.

And 12% German heritage actually sounds kind of low, considering that Americans with German heritage are the biggest ethnic group in the US. I'm pretty sure Ohio is over 12%.

wasn't the US something like... 1 vote off from speaking german instead of english?

That's a myth. http://german.about.com/library/weekly/aa010820a.htm

The US has never had an official national language and if it ever does, it will be American English. Twenty-eight states have made English their official language though I would have to check to see if they specified American English. It would be funny if they didn't.

The percentage of Americans claiming German heritage is actually very high and Hordini is correct. The American Community Survey shows that the percentage is 15.7 percent which is the highest self-identified ancestry group.

http://factfinder2.census.gov/faces/tableservices/jsf/pages/productview.xhtml?pid=ACS_12_5YR_DP02

NOTE however that the list doesn't include Spanish or Mexican or any other Latin American country. I haven't added up the numbers to see how many millions of people (if that) self-identified among the nationalities listed.

This map of the 2000 Census shows the states with the highest numbers of Americans of German ancestry. No one should be surprised by the mid-West and Pennsylvania. Note the pockets in Texas along the corridor between Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston. Lots of towns established there by German immigrants around 1848, when many frustrated Europeans immigrated following the failed revolutions.

Hey sorry for not being a huge part of this discussion, but I did not think it would get this amount of attention and I havnt had time to reveiw it. Thanks everyone

No worries. We had fun with your thread. I hope you picked up a bit of the German language from it as well as some perspective on all of the many variations. Hochdeutsch is not everything.