Is Pennsylvania Dutch the Amish German dialect, intelligible by other native speakers of German?
Start by noting that it’s derived from Plattdeutsch, not classic textbook German (Hochdeutsch), and much more closely related to Nederlands and Vlaaminge (AKA “Dutch” and “Flemish” – which are closely-related national variants of the same tongue) than to Hochdeutsch.
There are, however, 250-300 years of evolution in isolation separating Pennsylvania Dutch from the modern versions of its ancestral tongue. My hunch is that it’s about as intelligible to Jan Q. Hollander or Adolf von Schwaben as Afrikaans, i.e., with effort but not very.
Of course it is difficult to quantify such a thing, but I’d say it is similar to an unfamiliar regional dialect within Germany. You have a general idea what is going on but you miss some words and it’s hard to follow.
In Germany today this rarely a problem because everybody understands standard “newscaster” High German and by far most people can speak it to some degree. So the fact that Germans from all over the country can communicate without problems doesn’t say much about the mutual understandability of the dialects that especially older rural people use with each other.
So if I listened to a conversation between native speakers in Pennsylvania Dutch, I would miss a lot, but in general it is understandable to some degree. The question whether this is different enough to make it a different language opens a can of worms. Based on the examples that I heard, I would intuitively say no (unless you count many other German dialects as separate languages.) However I suspect that day-to-day PD is more influenced by English than carefully created recordings suggest. Unfortunately I have never heard PD “in the wild”.
Actually, it’s just the opposite. Pennsylvania Dutch is a Hochdeutsch dialect derived from the dialects around Franconia, so it is more closely related to standard German than to the Low German dialects.
I speak some Pennsylvania Dutch (the dialect is definately confined to the Amish or other Anabaptist sects), and I also took classes in High German in school.
I visted Germany when I was a teenager (at that time I was more fluent in PA Dutch then in High German for basic everyday conversations), and I had no problem making myself understood in the countryside of southern and western Germany with my PA Dutch alone. I had more trouble using my PA Dutch in cites, and in northren parts of the country, and had to resort to using my more clunky High German, or just speaking English.
As Polycarp mentioned, PA Dutch was derived from what is commonly called “Low German” (which is closer to the dialects of southwestern Germany to begin with), and it’s been isolated for more then 200 years. To modern speakers of High German, our pronuncations are off, spelling is terrible, and much of the grammar is gone. It is very much like hearing a very old fashioned, very rural, local dialect. These days there are also alot of English words sprinkled throughout your average PA Dutch conversation. In my expereince, English words are used for most new technology etc, as pretty much all PA Dutch speakers have at least some basic knowledge of English as well.
Surpisingly, (at least to me) PA Dutch and yiddish are also somewhat mutually intelligable. When I first met Yiddish speaking people, I was very much surprised to discover that while I definately did not understand every word, I could very often follow the conversation quite well.
Oops… That should read the dialect is definately NOT confined to the Amish… etc.
My apologies for any confusion.
-And in preview, yBeayf, I definately found it easier to understand the speech in the southwest countryside of Germany, and normally I would consider that the be closer to “low german” then the “high german” I learned in school.
I’m not a language scholar in anyway though… so I could certainly be wrong on what the accepted classifications of local dialects in modern day germany are (and I suspect there dialects, especially in that region of the world, are better viewed as a contineous spectrum, rather then trying to separate them into artifically discrete boxes.)
That would be quite strange since the Amish/Mennonites are descended mostly from immigrants from Switzerland and Southern/Western Germany. I think you’re mistaken about this, Poly.
the Ethnologue shows Pennsylvania Dutch as being related to the West Middle German dialects: http://www.ethnologue.com/show_family.asp?subid=90437
Luxembourgeois [ltz] (Luxembourg)
Mainfränkisch [vmf] (Germany)
Pfaelzisch [pfl] (Germany)
Limburgisch [lim] (Netherlands)
Kölsch [ksh] (Germany)
German, Pennsylvania [pdc] (USA)
Further it says:
Amish Pennsylvania German (Plain Pennsylvania German), Non-Amish Pennsylvania German (Pensylvanisch Deitsch, Non-Plain Pennsylvania German). Blending of several German dialects, primarily Rhenish Palatinate (Pfalzer) German, with syntactic elements of High German and English. Mostly incomprehensible now to a person from the Palatinate (Kloss 1978).
I’m no expert, but I think that many posters are confused by the translation of “Plattdeutsch” as “low German” and “Hochdeutsch” as “high German.”
In the first case, the the low refers to the area inhabited by the speakers, near the nether lands. Plattdeutsch is just one of many German dialects that are not Hochdeutsch. In the second case, the “hoch” in “Hochdeutsh” refers to its high status as standard German. It’s the dialect that won out.
Among the dialects that are not Hochdeutsch there are low, middle, and high groups roughly corresponding to northern, middle, and southern Germany.
Both Yiddish and Pennsylvania Dutch are derived from high German but sound just as quaint to a Hochdeutsch speaker as Plattdeutsch or any other dialect.
It’s true that Hochdeutsch is often used to refer to the “standard” dialect of (new) High German. However the original and correct meaning is a very broad group of dialects: those that participated in the High German consonant shift. Geographically this corresponds to central and southern part of the German speaking area. This group can be divided into Mitteldeutsch (Middle German) - including Pennsylvania Dutch - and Oberdeutsch (Upper German).
In the north you have Niederdeutsch (Low German). Plattdeutsch is an informal name for some Low German dialects.
My grandmother was partly descended from a Pennsylvania Dutch ancestor who immigrated from the Rheinpfaltz circa 1790, but I never got to hear any of the language. I guess Michael Wagoner’s descendants forgot how to speak it since most of them married Irish, according to the genealogy I saw. The Catholic ones, anyway.
I checked the Europe Languages map by Bogdan Zaborski in Goode’s World Atlas, and he places the Rheinland-Pfaltz within the Middle German zone. Along with Luxemburgish.
That’s the comparison I really want to see: Pennsylvania Dutch with Luxemburgish!
I would point out that the so-called ‘Pennsylvania Dutch’ are in fact spread out throughout the New World (at least). I have met some in Paraguay and Bolivia. I presume they are also in nearby Argentina and Uruguay too.
I have heard tell that there are others of the Old Faith in Belize, but that is not my area of expertise.
So how does their German sound? I don’t know, but they speak Spanish better than I do.
Why then, none back in the “old world”? With the declining population there is land to be had and they could even make themselves understood in the naive language.
I presume you mean there are Anabaptists (Amish, Mennonites, and/or Brethren) in Paraguay and Bolivia. Pennsylvania Dutch is not at all synonymous with Anabaptist. There’s a lot of overlap there, but the first is a cultural/ethnic identifier, and the second is a religious one. Lots of people identify as Pennsyvlania Dutch without being Anabaptist, and only Anabaptists living in SE PA are correctly identified as Pennsylvania Dutch.
If you want to see where the Amish and Mennonite are, find a copy of The Budget, the newspaper of the Amish/Mennonite community. You’ll see reports from all over the world there.
They have a website at http://www.thebudgetnewspaper.com, but it’s not functional. Looks like someone started working on it and put up a test.