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Pennsylvania Dutch: The Story of an American Language (Young Center Books in Anabaptist and Pietist Studies)

Amazon.com Price:  $50.26 (as of 12/04/2019 07:03 PST- Details)

Description

While most world languages spoken by minority populations are in serious danger of turning into extinct, Pennsylvania Dutch is thriving. If truth be told, the number of Pennsylvania Dutch speakers is growing exponentially, even if it is spoken by not up to one-tenth of one percent of the USA population and has remained for the most part an oral vernacular without official recognition or beef up. A true sociolinguistic wonder, Pennsylvania Dutch has been spoken often since the late eighteenth century, even supposing it has never been “refreshed” by later waves of immigration from out of the country.

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Drawing on scholarly literature, three decades of fieldwork, and ample historical documents―most of which have never before been made accessible to English-speaking readers―this is the first book to offer a comprehensive look at this unlikely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