The attitude, unfortunately, of a large percentage of high school and college teachers of German is still like that of the eighteenth century grammarian who "believed that the literary and upperclass standard language was older and more true to a standard of reason than the local speech-forms, which were due to the ignorance and carelessness of common people."' Too often do teachers of German compare the forms of the dialect with Standard German and then label everything which is different as "corrupt" or "Low German."2 They are completely unaware of the fact that "dialects have always been the feeders of literary language,"s and that the progress of historical linguistics has shown that "the standard language is by no means the oldest type, but has arisen, under particular historical conditions, from local dialects."' During the past few years I have heard high school and college teachers of German describe Pennsylvania German as follows: "a form of debased German," "corrupt German," "a mixture of bad German and English," "a mixture of Dutch and English," "Low German," or "Low German with English words mixed in."