Pennsylvania Dutch (, or ) or Pennsylvania German is a variety of Palatine German spoken by the Pennsylvania Dutch, including the Amish, Mennonites, Fancy Dutch, and other related groups in the United States and Canada. There are approximately 300,000 native speakers of Pennsylvania Dutch in the United States and Canada.
The language traditionally has been spoken by the Pennsylvania Dutch, who are descendants of late 17th- and early to late 18th-century immigrants to Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, and North Carolina, who arrived primarily from southern Germany and, to a lesser degree, the regions of Alsace and Lorraine in eastern France, and parts of Switzerland.
Differing explanations exist on why the Pennsylvania Dutch are referred to as Dutch, which typically refers to the inhabitants of the Netherlands or the Dutch language, only distantly related to Pennsylvania German.
Speakers of the dialect today are primarily found in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and other Midwestern states, as well as parts of the southern United States such as in Kentucky and Tennessee, and in Ontario in Canada. The dialect historically was also spoken in other regions where its use has largely or entirely faded. The use of Pennsylvania Dutch as a street language in urban areas of Pennsylvania, including Allentown, Reading, Lancaster, and York, was declining by the beginning of the 20th century. In more rural Pennsylvania areas, it continued in widespread use until World War II. Since that time, its use in Pennsylvania rural areas has greatly declined. It is best preserved in the Old Order Amish and Old Order Mennonite communities, and presently the members of both groups make up the vast majority of Pennsylvania Dutch speakers.
European origins
The ancestors of Pennsylvania Dutch speakers came from various parts of the southwestern regions of German-speaking Europe, including Baden, Palatinate (region), Hesse, Saxony, Swabia, Württemberg, Alsace, German Lorraine, and Switzerland. Most of the people in these areas spoke Rhine Franconian, especially Palatine German and, to a lesser degree, Alemannic dialects; it is believed that in the first generations after the settlers arrived, the dialects merged, as there were few new German immigrants for a period of ~60 years. (ca. 1760 to ca. 1820). The result of that dialect leveling was a dialect very close to the eastern dialects of Palatine German, especially the rural dialects around Mannheim/Ludwigshafen.
Pennsylvania Dutch is mainly derived from Palatine German which at the present time spoken mainly by older Germans in the Rhine-Neckar Metropolitan Region, a region almost identical to the historical Palatinate. There are similarities between the German dialect that is still spoken in this small part of southwestern Germany and Pennsylvania Dutch. When individuals from the Palatinate (Pfalz) region of Germany today encounter Pennsylvania Dutch speakers, conversation is often possible to a limited degree.
Comparison with Standard German Pennsylvania Dutch for the most part does not reflect the diverse origins of the early speakers from regions along the upper Rhine River (Rhineland, Württemberg, Baden, Saarland, Switzerland and Alsace) but almost exclusively the strong immigrant group from the Palatine.
Pennsylvania Dutch is not a corrupted form of Standard German, since Standard German developed as a written standard based on the various spoken German dialects in a very long process that started in the time of classical Middle High German (1170–1250). Pennsylvania Dutch instead reflects the independent development of Palatine German, especially from the region that is called in German.
Since Pennsylvania Dutch is largely derived from Palatine German, which did not fully undergo the High German consonant shift, several vowels and consonants in Pennsylvania Dutch differ when compared with Standard German or Upper German dialects such as Alemannic and Bavarian.
The American English influence is most significant on vocabularyHelga Seel: Lexikologische Studien zum Pennsylvaniadeutschen: Wortbildung des Pennsylvaniadeutschen. Stuttgart, 1988. and to a much lesser degree on pronunciation; the English influence on grammar is relatively small. The question of whether the large loss of the dative case—the most significant difference compared with Palatine German—is due to English influence or reflects an inner development is disputed.
Grammar
As in Standard German, Pennsylvania Dutch uses three genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter). Pennsylvania Dutch has three cases for personal pronouns: the accusative, nominative, and dative, and two cases for nouns: the common case, with both accusative and nominative functions, and the dative case. There is no genitive case in Pennsylvania Dutch. The historical genitive case has been replaced by the dative, and possession is indicated with a special construction using the dative and the possessive pronoun: 'the man's dog' becomes (literally: 'to the man his dog'). Studies have shown variability in the use of the dative case in both sectarian and non-sectarian communities. The trend is towards use of the common case for nouns and the accusative case for pronouns, instead of the dative. Thus, , for example, has frequently become .
The dative case in Pennsylvania German is used to express possession, to mark objects of prepositions, to mark indirect objects, and to indicate the direct objects of certain verbs. It is expressed, as in Standard German, through the use of dative forms of personal pronouns and through certain inflections of articles and adjectives modifying nouns. In non-sectarian speech in central Pennsylvania, the dative is widely used among the older generations who are fluent in Pennsylvania German, whereas younger semi-speakers tend not to use the dative as much. Many semi-speakers used the English possessive -'s.
In contrast, Anabaptists in central Pennsylvania had almost completely replaced the dative with the accusative case. Meanwhile, members of the entirely Pennsylvania Dutch-speaking community in Kalona, Iowa, all of whom were Amish or Mennonite, showed strong age-related variation. Speakers under the age of 40 never used the dative, while older speakers showed strongly variable behavior. There was little difference between members of the different religious denominations in the Kalona.
Many verbs of English origin are used in Pennsylvania Dutch. Most English-origin verbs are treated as German weak verbs, receiving a past participle with a prefix and a suffix, thus for example the past participle of 'change' is usually . Verbs with unstressed first syllables generally do not take the prefix, so the past participle of 'adopt' is adopted, as in English. This follows the pattern of words with inseparable prefixes in German. However, English-origin verbs which are stressed on the first syllable may also appear without the prefix. Thus, 'realize' is conjugated simply as realized, and 'farm' may be conjugated as farmed or . Some German-origin verbs may also appear without the prefix. 'talk, speak', may be conjugated as or simply as . Both English influence and overall simplification may be at work in the dropping of the prefix.
Pennsylvania Dutch, like Standard German, has many separable verbs composed of a root verb and a prefix. Some of these in Standard German are completely semantically transparent, such as 'to go with', from 'with' and 'go'. Others, like which means 'to inform' and not the sharing of concrete entities, are not semantically transparent. That is, their meaning is not the sum of their parts. Separable verbs are used widely in Pennsylvania Dutch, and separable verbs can even be formed with English roots and prefixes. Virtually all separable verbs in Pennsylvania Dutch are semantically transparent. Many semantically opaque separable verbs such as , meaning, 'to move house', has been replaced by the English word move.
Adjectival endings exist but appear simplified compared to Standard German. As in all other South German dialects, the past tense is generally expressed using the perfect: ('I have run into the field') and not the simple past ( ['I ran into the field']), which is retained only in the verb "to be", as or , corresponding to English was and were. The subjunctive mood is extant only as ( is totally lost) in a limited number of verbs. In all other verbs it is expressed through the form of of the verbs 'to do' () and 'to have' (/) combined with the infinitive or the past participle, e.g., ('I would eat'), ('I would have eaten').
Two examples of Pennsylvania Dutch grammars are A Simple Grammar of Pennsylvania Dutch by J. William Frey and A Pennsylvania German Reader and Grammar by Earl C. Haag.
Pronunciation The tables below use IPA symbols to compare sounds used in Standard German (to the left) with sounds that correspond to them in their Pennsylvania Dutch cognates, reflecting their respective evolutions since they diverged from a common origin.
Vowels +Standard German vowelPennsylvania Dutch vowelStandard German cognatePennsylvania Dutch cognate (in some words) from Middle High German from Middle High German (in some dialects )Boden
Consonants +Standard German consonantPennsylvania Dutch consonantStandard German cognatePennsylvania Dutch cognate (mostly following a vowel + ) (before a liquid) final – (often) final – (before or ) final (after and )
In Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, there have been numerous other shifts that can make their Pennsylvania Dutch particularly difficult for modern High German speakers to understand. A word beginning in in some subdialects becomes , which is more easily pronounced, and so German > > and German > > . Likewise, German > > . German > > . The shift is rather common with German children learning to speak.
The softened after guttural consonants has mixed with the guttural of earlier generations and also turned into an American and so German > > and German > > . The changes in pronunciation, combined with the general disappearance of declensions as described above, result in a form of the dialect that has evolved somewhat from its early Pennsylvania origins nearly 300 years ago and is still rather easy to understand by German dialect speakers of the Rhineland-Palatinate area.
Interaction with English
The people from southern Germany, eastern France and Switzerland, where the Pennsylvania Dutch culture and dialect sprung, started to arrive in North America in the late 17th and the early 18th centuries, before the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. To a more limited extent, that is also true of a second wave of immigration in the mid-19th century, which came from the same regions, but settled more frequently in Ohio, Indiana, and other parts of the Midwest. Thus, an entire industrial vocabulary relating to electricity, machinery and modern farming implements has naturally been borrowed from the English. For Pennsylvania Dutch speakers who work in a modern trade or in an industrial environment, this could potentially increase the challenge of maintaining their mother tongue.
Numerous English words have been borrowed and adapted for use in Pennsylvania Dutch since the first generations of Pennsylvania German habitation of southeastern Pennsylvania. Examples of English loan words that are relatively common are ( 'I bet you can speak Pennsylvania Dutch'), ( 'it depends somewhat on who you are'); for 'chap' or 'guy'; and for 'to jump'. Today, many speakers will use Pennsylvania Dutch words for the smaller numerals and English for larger and more complicated numbers, like $27,599.