The fascinating story of America's oldest thriving heritage language.
Winner of the Dale W. Brown Book Award by the Young Center for Anabaptists and Pietist Studies at Elizabethtown College
While most world languages spoken by minority populations are in serious danger of becoming extinct, Pennsylvania Dutch is thriving. In fact, the number of Pennsylvania Dutch speakers is growing exponentially, although it is spoken by less than one-tenth of one percent of the United States population and has remained for the most part an oral vernacular without official recognition or support. A true sociolinguistic wonder, Pennsylvania Dutch has been spoken continuously since the late eighteenth century despite having never been "refreshed" by later waves of immigration from abroad.
In this probing study, Mark L. Louden, himself a fluent speaker of Pennsylvania Dutch, provides readers with a close look at the place of the language in the life and culture of two major subgroups of speakers: the "Fancy Dutch," whose ancestors were affiliated mainly with Lutheran and German Reformed churches, and traditional Anabaptist sectarians known as the "Plain people"--the Old Order Amish and Mennonites.
Drawing on scholarly literature, three decades of fieldwork, and ample historical documents--most of which have never before been made accessible to English-speaking readers--this is the first book to offer a comprehensive look at this unlikely linguistic success story.
Mark L. Louden is the Alfred L. Shoemaker, J. William Frey, and Don Yoder Professor of Germanic Linguistics and director of the Max Kade Institute for German-American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Table of Contents
PrefaceAcknowledgments1. What Is Pennsylvania Dutch?2. Early History of Pennsylvania Dutch3. Pennsylvania Dutch, 1800–18604. Profiles in Pennsylvania Dutch Literature5. Pennsylvania Dutch in the Public Eye6. Pennsylvania Dutch and the Amish and Mennonites7. An American StoryNotesBibliographyIndex
What People are Saying About This
Karen Johnson-Weiner
Mark L. Louden is the foremost scholar of Pennsylvania Dutch. A significant contribution to linguistic, sociolinguistic, historical, and anthropological scholarship, his book is extensively researched, accessible, and filled with a wealth of language examples that will appeal to a wide audience.
From the Publisher
Mark L. Louden is the foremost scholar of Pennsylvania Dutch. A significant contribution to linguistic, sociolinguistic, historical, and anthropological scholarship, his book is extensively researched, accessible, and filled with a wealth of language examples that will appeal to a wide audience.—Karen Johnson-Weiner, SUNY Potsdam, coauthor of The Amish
