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.