REGARDING THE TERM "PENNSYLVANIA DUTCH"

 

When I was growing up, I assumed that the term Pennsylvania Dutch referred exclusively to the Amish. And since all the tourist-trap signs that I saw in Lancaster County seemed to feature windmills and tulips, I naturally assumed that the Pennsylvania Dutch were from the Netherlands. It was not until I became an adult and started researching my ancestry that I realized that the term applied to all German-speaking immigrants of the eighteenth century. By golly, the Kistlers were as Pennsylvania Dutch as the Amish, who, I learned, were originally from Switzerland.

 

Although some who study the culture loathe the term Pennsylvania German as an artificial academic construct, I am among those who use Pennsylvania German and Pennsylvania Dutch interchangeably. For the longest time, I assumed that the “Dutch” was merely a corruption of Deutsch, the German word for anything German. However, once I delved into the history, I came to understand that the English in colonial America commonly referred to all people from the Rhinelands as “the Dutch.” Some made a distinction between “the High Dutch” of Germany and the “the Low Dutch” of the Netherlands.

 

I also had mistaken assumptions regarding the Pennsylvania Dutch language. Commonly referred to as the Dialect, the language is still spoken by the Amish and old-timers in rural Pennsylvania. Like many people, I long believed that the Dialect was a time-worn corruption of formal High German. (The Amish and some other sects use High German in their church services.) I learned that Pennsylvania Dutch is actually a vestige of a German vernacular dialect that is still spoken in parts of southwest Germany. John Zug and others have written how German visitors were astonished to hear people speaking a language so familiar in accent and vocabulary it seemed as if they must be from a neighboring village, and yet it was a language that had survived in virtual isolation on the other side of the Atlantic for hundreds of years.

 

Beginning in the late nineteenth century, Pennsylvania Germans who saw their culture declining started various social organizations as part of a movement to revitalize the Dialect. The Pennsylvania German Society has been a leading force in the effort to preserve the language and literature of the Pennsylvania Dutch.