Awards

• Winner of Dale Brown Book Award for Outstanding Scholarship in Anabaptist and Pietist Studies 2017 (United States)

Overview

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, even though it has 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 conservative 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 Drawing on scholarly literature, three decades of fieldwork, and ample historical documents - most of which have never before been made accessible to English-speaking readers - this is the first book to offer a comprehensive look at this unlikely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.

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9781421418285

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Reviews

[ Pennsylvania Dutch] is written in a very accessible style and provides good information about the Pennsylvania Dutch language. Canadian Mennonite Louden captures the spirit of the folk-cultural narrative and remains engaging, accessible and entertaining to a wide range of audiences. Pennsylvania Heritage Mark Louden, author of Pennsylvania Dutch: The Story of an American Language, surely has written the definitive guide to the subject. Lancaster Mennonite Historical Society Indeed, this is a one-of-a-kind, exceptionally valuable book... So, scrape your pennies together, and go buy this book-before it's sold out! Pennsylvania Mennonite Heritage

[ Pennsylvania Dutch] is written in a very accessible style and provides good information about the Pennsylvania Dutch language. Canadian Mennonite Louden captures the spirit of the folk-cultural narrative and remains engaging, accessible and entertaining to a wide range of audiences. Pennsylvania Heritage Mark Louden, author of Pennsylvania Dutch: The Story of an American Language, surely has written the definitive guide to the subject. Lancaster Mennonite Historical Society Indeed, this is a one-of-a-kind, exceptionally valuable book... So, scrape your pennies together, and go buy this book-before it's sold out! Pennsylvania Mennonite Heritage Louden's interdisciplinary work, sweeping as it does through centuries of history and across a vast continent, draws on three decades of study into the language's evolution and social history. Mennonite World Review

[ Pennsylvania Dutch] is written in a very accessible style and provides good information about the Pennsylvania Dutch language. Canadian Mennonite

Author Information

Mark L. Louden is a professor of Germanic linguistics and codirector of the Max Kade Institute for German-American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

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