Our Amish Language — The Dial

There are linguistic tics and habits that give away formerly Amish people immediately. I remember, for example, when I trained myself into saying “seven” instead of “saven.” I still think of it sometimes when I say the word, how it used to sound on my tongue, slow and sloping instead of quick and peaked, the way hooche Leit or “non-Amish people” always said it. This, and other quirks of pronunciation or vocabulary, are easy tells when accents have otherwise smoothed into plain old American and traditional clothing has been shed in favor of jeans and T-shirts. It’s not just speech, either — there’s something in people’s manner, the way they hold themselves. “I could be at a bus station anywhere in the United States and I can pick out an Amish person who’s not wearing Amish clothing,” Benjamin, who is married to my first cousin once removed, told me.At first, the Libby community had no intention of relaxing its traditional practices, even though its theological beliefs were shifting. But it became harder and harder for some members to keep refusing modern conveniences (cars, radios) and clothing (zippers, bright colors), as they believed less and less that the state of their souls was tied to their outward appearance. Most of my family fall into this category. We’ve been Amish as far back as our records go. My father’s Amish ancestor Samuel Mueller migrated to Pennsylvania in the mid-18th century. Nearly 250 years later, in 1992, my dad’s family established a new community in Libby, in Northwest Montana. Its main language was Pennsylvania Dutch, as in almost all Amish communities. The Libby community was intended to be traditionally Amish, but with more spiritual openness. Members might be led by the Holy Spirit to speak in tongues or prophesy, for example, or to dance during worship. Within a couple of years, the new community was interacting with local, non-Amish churches, and hosting new kinds of Bible studies and weekly meetings.At first, the Libby community had no intention of relaxing its traditional practices, even though its theological beliefs were shifting.

But it became harder and harder for some members to keep refusing modern conveniences (cars, radios) and clothing (zippers, bright colors), as they believed less and less that the state of their souls was tied to their outward appearance. Since everyone was modernizing, albeit at different speeds, members of the Libby community did not have to fear the serious consequences of formal public rebuke and ostracization that happen in other Amish communities when a member breaks church rules.Parts of the Libby church split, with some families moving away because they wanted to modernize all at once, and others because they wanted change to happen more slowly. Those who remained continued the hard process of deciding what changes to allow in their own families. In 2004, the first and only major communal ruling came about, to allow cars. A few years later, people slowly began trying contemporary clothes. For the men, this wasn’t so dramatic — often a pair of jeans and a different buttoned shirt. For the women, it was more complicated. Many continued sewing their own dresses, but incrementally made items that were more colorful or elaborate, or had different silhouettes. Others tried simple, store-bought dresses or blouses with floor-length skirts. Despite my pleading, I wasn’t allowed to wear pants until I was nearly a teen.English started to be used more frequently in Libby, alongside Pennsylvania Dutch. By the time I was born in 2000, members of the community were associating more regularly than ever with hooche Leit. Non-Amish religious leaders from town would meet with those who wanted their input on matters of faith. Running the family grocery store meant we all rubbed shoulders with customers who spoke no Pennsylvania Dutch. The community had a tiny selection of English-language VHS tapes and DVDs, along with a VCR, which was passed around family to family, slyly at first. (I remember watching Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” from behind the sofa soon after it came out, terrified.) All this exposure meant I learned English before I could remember doing so, and was fluent in both languages.It was important to me that the interviews be in Deitsch. There are few audiovisual recordings of native speakers: Most traditional Amish don’t allow themselves to be photographed or video recorded, as it violates their interpretation of the scripture forbidding the making of any “graven image.”

The interviews will serve as a repository of language and culture, and the way that both have evolved over the past decades. In 2008, there was a first young person in the Libby community to marry someone who didn’t speak Pennsylvania Dutch. Five years later, another. My non-Amish sister-in-law joined family events at a young age; she and my brother married in 2016, when they were both 18. (They had met three and a half years previously, when her family moved into a house up the road from our church.) At our Miller Christmas party, or a summer backyard dinner, my relatives would speed through conversations in Deitsch (the name for our language, in our language) while she sat awkwardly at the edge. I stayed next to her, murmuring pieces of different exchanges to help her understand the tone of the room, the kinds of interactions that were unfolding. That was a decade ago; now that so many more cousins have married non-Amish partners, English pervades most family spaces and occasions.When I was at college in California, far removed from the environment I had grown up in, I became fascinated by my community’s transition away from traditionalism. I wanted to find some way of recording it and so, in my last semester at Berkeley, I applied for a grant to fund an oral history project. I would interview around 30 people from my community on video, speaking with them in Pennsylvania Dutch, and translate every exchange into English for subtitles.It was important to me that the interviews be in Deitsch. There are few audiovisual recordings of native speakers: Most traditional Amish don’t allow themselves to be photographed or video recorded, as it violates their interpretation of the scripture forbidding the making of any “graven image.” The interviews will serve as a repository of language and culture, and the way that both have evolved over the past decades. I now have over two dozen hours of native speakers telling stories, a treasure for my family and any other interested parties, and a record of what it’s like to move between such disparate worlds.✺I had arrived at Berkeley via a circuitous route. I left school at 12, a little earlier than is typical for Amish children. I then worked full-time at the family grocery store.

A few years later, I moved to northern California to attend a ministry school, and heard two hosts at the restaurant where I worked mention California’s free community college. I thought I might as well try it. Though I had no plans to finish college, no idea what that even meant, I ended up transferring to Berkeley after two years.It was there that I discovered how much I did not know about my mother tongue. There are a few lines that get passed around among the Amish like a hand-me-down shirt when it comes to their linguistic history, and none of them contains more than a kernel of verifiable information. But once I started looking, I found a wealth of scholars, university departments, articles, YouTube videos, even textbooks on Pennsylvania Dutch that I had never imagined existed.One of the earliest critiques dates from the 1780s, when a German visitor to the U.S. described Pennsylvania Dutch as a “miserably broken mishmash of English and German” and a “bastard gibberish.” When I first read historian and linguist Mark Louden’s diagnosis of Pennsylvania Dutch’s “image problem,” in his book Pennsylvania Dutch: The Story of an American Language, I found a name for what I’d observed and contributed to all my life. More than 250 years have passed since the first agrarian, working-class Germans and Swiss emigrated to the U.S., bringing with them a language that developed into the Pennsylvania Dutch we speak now. (It’s Pennsylvania Dutch not because of the Dutch that is spoken in the Netherlands, but because German- and Dutch-speaking peoples alike were called Dutchmen, in English, at the time of immigration.) Accents change with time, as does vocabulary. Pennsylvania Dutch and German are for the most part not mutually intelligible, even if they share many similar words and structures. Still, the Amish consistently compare their language unfavorably to standard German. A thousand times my cousins and I have spoken about our language derogatively, to each other or to non-Amish people, saying, “it’s just a mix of English and German” or “it’s wrong German.” We believed that over the past few hundred years we had disfigured what was originally correct. “

There are so many English words mixed in, it’s really a dialect, not fully a language on its own,” my cousin Abigail said in her interview, when I asked her about her mother tongue.The roots of this internalized stigma can be traced back to the language’s early days in the colonies of the “New World.” One of the earliest critiques dates from the 1780s, when a German visitor to the U.S. described Pennsylvania Dutch as a “miserably broken mishmash of English and German” and a “bastard gibberish.” From the 1840s until World War I, people from German-speaking Europe flooded into the country, with particularly high numbers settling in the Midwest. In Pennsylvania and neighboring states, when these newer immigrants encountered “Pennsylvania Dutch,” they scorned the language for its inclusion of English words, and because they thought it no longer sounded like the German that they spoke. (In fact, the origins of Pennsylvania Dutch are primarily in the Palatinate region of southern Germany, where the language already differed from standard German, as many regional varieties did.) Records of public meetings and community newspapers feature jabs at how far these sorry kinsmen have strayed from their heritage. Iterations of this attitude have persisted through eight generations and nearly 250 years.There are other reasons for the stigma attached to Pennsylvania Dutch, including that the language is almost exclusively used orally. Originally, standard German would have served for writing purposes, for the limited number who were literate, but English slowly replaced it. (All Amish parochial schools conduct their instruction in English.) Partly because of its oral nature, the language is often described as a dialect. I grew up using this term, but upon encountering Louden’s work, I learned that “dialect” often functions more as an insult than a linguistically useful designation. Louden writes that “nonlinguists frequently assume that ‘written down’ languages are somehow more ‘correct’” than oral ones, and notes that there are no “objective criteria” that dictate whether something is a language or a dialect. In theory, any language that overlaps with another — to an unspecified degree — could be categorized as a dialect. This is not how the designation works in practice.