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Pennsylvania Dutch/German | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| Chris Ford Groupie United States Joined 4745 days ago 65 posts - 101 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Portuguese | Message 1 of 12 13 December 2012 at 4:09am | IP Logged | ||
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Sorry if this has been discussed before - the search feature hasn't been working for me.
I was just curious if anyone out there has any experience with Pennsylvania Dutch? It's actually a variant of German - "Dutch" is a corruption of "Deutsch," and the term "Pennsylvania Dutch" is widely used to refer to Amish and Mennonites in the Eastern US. I imagine attempting to learn the language remotely would be nearly impossible, based on the fact that it's mostly spoken by Old Order Mennonites and Amish whose religious beliefs do not allow them to use most modern technologies. There doesn't seem to be a standardized system of spelling either, although there is a newspaper, which can be found online at http://hiwwewiedriwwe.wordpress.com/. Additionally, I was wondering if those who are fluent in modern High German (or older variants of German) would be able to understand either written or spoken Pennsylvania Dutch? There are videos at the above link as well, though none of the videos appear to feature the Amish community members who would represent the majority of the speakers - their religious (or arguably cultural, in this instance) beliefs do not permit them to be filmed or photographed. Edit: Also, it appears the above link also has a series of audio lessons. Scroll over to the left side of the page to listen. Edited by Chris Ford on 13 December 2012 at 4:18am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Mani Diglot Senior Member Germany imsprachendickicht.b Joined 4907 days ago 258 posts - 323 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Swedish, Portuguese, Latin, Welsh, Luxembourgish | Message 2 of 12 13 December 2012 at 9:54am | IP Logged | ||
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Well, my only experience with Pennsylvania Dutch is from watching documentaries. I'd say I understand most of it (can't tell you for sure as those documentaries usually come with a delayed voice-over which is very confusing, I really wish they would change to subs!) but I think someone who speaks a Palatine dialect him-/herself (as Pennsylvania Dutch mainly originates from Palatine dialects) will understand more than I do.
I just looked at the blog you mentioned and can confirm I can read it too. It's not as easy as reading High German, but I understand maybe 99% of it. By the way, did you know that a Pennsylvania Dutch Wikipedia exists? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6705 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 3 of 12 13 December 2012 at 10:40am | IP Logged | ||
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I have spent some time listening to the videos at http://hiwwewiedriwwe.wordpress.com/ (as suggested by Chris Ford), and my first impression is that there is more English than Deitsch, and it is difficult to judge whether the persons who speak really use it or just barely have kept their Dietsch alive as a heritage language. However halfway into an interview with a certain John Schmid I finally got enough sentences in a row to judge who much I personally understood. And it did sound slightly unusual, but if I had one hour of uninterrupted speech I'm sure I could have understood it fairly fluently (minus some isolated dialect words which don' even occur in normal Low German).
The thing that struck me most was that it didn't ressemble the kind of Low German I know from NDR more. And in the written texts at the site I picked some curious cases where the language (or dialect or whatever it is) lies midway between High and Low German, - for instance there is one "ge-" and one missing "ge-" in this sentence from the Beemg'schicht: "Wie eener zu der erscht Baam kumme iss, hot er g’saat" ('as one to the first tree come is, has he said:..'). In Plattdüütsch both "ge-"s would be missing, in High German there would be two times "ge-": "gekommen" and "gesagt". Of course Low German isn't standardized and there are different dialects with different phonological and orthographical systems, but this apparently also is the case for Pennsylvanian Dietsch. And apart from that it might be worth mentioning that there is another group of German 'Auswanderersprachen', namely the kind known as "Plaut-" or Mennonite Dietsch, which apparently developed around Wistula in presentday Poland, but now is spoken in a few places in Latin America (such as the Western part of Paraguay) and according to Wikipedia also in parts of Canada. Edited by Iversen on 13 December 2012 at 10:47am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| daegga Tetraglot Senior Member Austria lang-8.com/553301 Joined 4523 days ago 1076 posts - 1792 votes Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Swedish, Norwegian Studies: Danish, French, Finnish, Icelandic | Message 4 of 12 13 December 2012 at 3:20pm | IP Logged | ||
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The written form looks like how Swabian sounds to me. The lessons ... well, it sounds like an American trying to read German for the first time.
@Iversen the "missing" ge- can be easily explained: as you see in g'saat, the e got elided, the same would happen in gekommen, rendering it an unpronounceable g'kumme, so the g just gets omitted too. In my dialect, the same sentence would be: "Wia ana zu de eastn Baam kumma is, hot a g'sogt". Here the same thing is happening. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| daristani Senior Member United States Joined 7146 days ago 752 posts - 1661 votes Studies: Uzbek | Message 5 of 12 13 December 2012 at 3:51pm | IP Logged | ||
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I grew up in Pennsylvania in an area that had a fair number of Amish nearby who used Pennsylvania German in their daily life, but unfortunately I didn't get interested in the language until after I'd moved away from the area.
One of the interesting things about the language is that, in a way similar to Yiddish among Jews, it seems to be preserved primarily only among those religious groups that set themselves off from the broader society, with the many "secular" speakers of past decades now having become almost entirely English-speaking. There are some decent resources to learn it via English (though unfortunately lacking audio): A Pennsylvania German Reader and Grammar by Earl C. Haag Pennsylvania German Dictionary by Eugene S. Stine A Pennsylvania German Anthology edited by Earl C. Haag An older textbook that may still be available: A Pennsylvania German Grammar by Albert F. Buffington and Preston A. Barba 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| beano Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4624 days ago 1049 posts - 2152 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Russian, Serbian, Hungarian | Message 6 of 12 13 December 2012 at 3:53pm | IP Logged | ||
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I remember seeing a film that had some Pennsylvanian dialogue (something about a child being a vital witness to a crime) and it sounded like a form of German to me. I understood a fair bit.
I've also seen a couple of documentaries about the Amish communities but it seems the young people are all speaking English to each other. Maybe they were doing this for the benefit of the cameras, or is the old Germanic language losing popularity among the younger people? Edited by beano on 13 December 2012 at 3:53pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Fuenf_Katzen Diglot Senior Member United States notjustajd.wordpress Joined 4371 days ago 337 posts - 476 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Polish, Ukrainian, Afrikaans | Message 7 of 12 13 December 2012 at 3:53pm | IP Logged | ||
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Perhaps native German speakers would have a much easier time understanding it, much like native English speakers have a better understanding of different English pronunciations.
The accent itself is different from what you typically hear. Sometimes its a mix of Hochdeutsch + English + southwestern US accent. Quite a combination! If you read it very slowly, you can usually figure it out, especially if a more German-based spelling is used. That said, I really enjoy hearing Pennsylvania Dutch. It has a very interesting linguistic situation, because gradually, they're replacing German words with English words. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Fuenf_Katzen Diglot Senior Member United States notjustajd.wordpress Joined 4371 days ago 337 posts - 476 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Polish, Ukrainian, Afrikaans | Message 8 of 12 13 December 2012 at 4:01pm | IP Logged | ||
I've certainly heard younger Amish speaking in PA Dutch to each other, but it's almost always mixed in with English words. I wonder if it will eventually become more of a pidgin or a hybrid language. The other difficulty with PA Dutch is that they will usually not speak it with the English (they use that term for anyone who is non-Amish or non-Mennonite), so opportunities to really practice could be challenging. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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