To date, I’ve focused on some serious language powerhouses—the likes of English, Arabic, and Swahili, all languages that are spoken by hundreds of millions of people. So to switch it up, I thought I’d highlight a little guy. Pennsylvania Dutch isn’t even its own language. It’s a dialect. And it’s not a dialect of Dutch! This fascinating tale actually owes its origins to German. Here’s the short version, in English of course.
Background
In current times, it’s impossible to tell the story of Pennsylvania Dutch, or more accurately Pennsylvania German, without telling the story of the Anabaptists, whose US representation is comprised largely of the well-documented Amish and Mennonite communities. (Other groups such as Hutterites and Brethren are also in the mix.) Such communities are often characterized by their simple dress, agricultural lifestyle, and incomplete adoption of modern technology, though the degree of variation can be rather large.
Going back to 16th-century Europe, Anabaptists were considered part of the Radical Reformation, with reformation referring to changes in the Catholic Church that ultimately resulted in the split between Roman Catholics and Protestants. Anabaptists, who practiced nonresistance, were particularly against state control of the Church and infant baptism. Baptism, in their view, was something that should be chosen by adults, a stance that was viewed as radical. Their movement is said to have officially started in 1525 in Switzerland, a German-speaking region. It subsequently spread to adjacent regions in Europe, though adherents were not treated very kindly by Catholics or more mainstream Protestants.
Menno Simons became a prominent Anabaptist leader, with his followers referred to as Mennonites. In the subsequent century, a leader named Jakob Ammann promoted a practice called shunning, or social rejection of individuals who violated certain rules, leading to a split in the community (in 1693 to be exact). Ammann’s followers became known as the Amish.
The Amish and Mennonites began coming to the US in the 17th and 18th centuries to escape persecution. The Quaker William Penn and his colony of Pennsylvania offered refuge from religious persecution, serving as a logical landing spot. The stage was thus set for the interaction of Pennsylvania with German, bringing about Pennsylvania…Dutch (more on that below).
Over the years, there were also many (and probably far more) non-Anabaptist German speakers in Pennsylvania. The descendants of these groups have largely adopted English, with an intervening dialect called Pennsylvania Dutch English approaching obsolescence. As such, Pennsylvania Dutch has now become strongly associated with the Anabaptist communities that continue to speak it.
The Dialect
The German brought to Pennsylvania by the aforementioned communities was mostly the Palatine German dialect, which, over time, began mixing with local language elements, namely American English vocabulary and pronunciation.
As for the whole Dutch thing, speakers of Pennsylvania German referred to their language as Deitsch (related to the word Deutsch), which was corrupted to Dutch, partly due to the previously broader use of the term Dutch to refer to a wide range of Germanic regions.
Estimates of the number of speakers of the dialect are somewhat hard to come by, but something like 300,000 may be reasonable. The vast majority of these speakers are likely also fluent in English, which is used for most reading and writing.
As Amish and Mennonite communities have spread over time in pursuit of farmland, Pennsylvania Dutch can be heard in US states like Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Missouri, New York, Ohio, West Virginia, and Wisconsin (in addition to Pennsylvania). Outside the US, the dialect can be heard in Ontario, Canada, and tiny pockets of Latin America in countries such as Belize, Bolivia, and Argentina among others.
This is where I usually put some sort of motivational statement about learning another language. I’ll probably skip that part in this particular case. What I will say, however, is that as a window into some truly compelling history and sociology, Pennsylvania Dutch is the gift that keeps on giving.
