The Pennsylvania Dutch Language
By DR. J. WILLIAM FREY
Chairman of the Department of German and Russian at Franklin and Marshall College
We bisht? We gaits? (How are you? How goes it?) That’s the familiar greeting throughout the length and breadth of the Pennsylvania Dutch country. This is symbolic of the relative sameness of the Pennsylvania Dutch tongue no matter where you go in southeastern Pennsylvania or, in fact, anywhere else a Dutchman has happened to wander. This is linguistically and culturally a unique phenomenon. Travel in any European country—staying away from the large cities—and you will find almost mutually unintelligible dialects spoken from one community to the next, a mere dozen or so miles away. These wide language divergencies reflect vast cultural-historical differences, deep-rooted in tradition and folkways. But in the Pennsylvania Dutchland—whether you visit the Amish on their unparalleled farms of Lancaster County or whether you call on the Church groups (Lutheran and Reformed) located almost directly north of Philadelphia—you will find Pennsylvania Dutch spoken and understood with only enough differences to make it interesting. In fact, there is not nearly so much difference in the pronunciation and vocabulary and idioms of one brand of Pennsylvania Dutch from another as there is, say, between the native speech of a Bostonian and that of a Charlestonian!
The uniqueness of the situation is perhaps amazing to a European, but hardly to an American. Here in the greatest melting pot culture in the world it is no new thing to find widely diversified groups leveling off their ways and their speech to form a common American denominator. In the Pennsylvania Dutch country we have by far the most widely diversified folk culture in America and at the same time a unity of language which astounds the scholars of linguistic science. There has never really been any such thing as a ‘united front’ among the Pennsylvania Dutch people—no nationalistic-political ties, no yearning for some once-deserted-now-idealized ‘fatherland,’ no dominant (nor domineering) religious body. Hence, our language has never taken on any ‘standardizing’ regulations, has never been given a hard and fast orthography, has never been elevated to the position of a subject in the public school curriculum, has never enjoyed the so-called dignity of great oratory, classic literature or even journalism.
It has always been and always will be only FOLK SPEECH. As such it is the perfect oral expression of our Pennsylvania Dutch folk and their rich folk culture. But as such it has also suffered greatly—mocked and despised and branded as ‘only a dialect,’ ‘a corrupt form of German,’ ‘a kind of Pennsylvania hog Latin’ by all those in the past who, not appreciating nor even knowing what folk culture really is and means, could see no good in a language which according to their puny and narrow educational background ‘did not even have a grammar or a dictionary’! Only very recently have those of us who are interested in the study of folk cultures and folk linguistics seen the real and underlying values in the language—now, at a time when it is very rapidly dying out, when hardly any member of the new generation speaks anything but English (though that with often a heavy Pennsylvania Dutch savor), when the near future will witness the almost complete disappearance of this interesting, humorous, beloved folk speech except for its persistent employment by the Old Order Amish in their religious services and most of their everyday conversations.
No grammar? EVERY language has grammar—Pennsylvania Dutch has its share to be sure. There are ten parts of speech, three genders of nouns (and you can’t hang a feminine article on a masculine noun!).
‘Outen the light’ is our common Lancaster County way of saying ‘turn out the light,’ and it is simply a short and efficient expression for getting the deed accomplished. The same is true of the shortened form ‘this after’ instead of ‘this afternoon’—an expression you’ll hear from the lips of every Lancaster City and County inhabitant.
Some expressions in our quaint English here are actually direct translations from the Pennsylvania Dutch language, but they have become such common property that many a Lancastrian uses them even though his background is anything but Dutch. For example, a beautiful little phrase to indicate that you ‘live next door’ to someone is the very warm idiom: ‘they live neighbors to us’ or ‘we live neighbors to them.’ Now isn’t that a real friendly way of putting it?
Actually, then, the impress of Pennsylvania Dutch upon the Nation linguistically has been negligible. It is not enough to boast about the Pennsylvania Dutch ancestry of the Hoovers, the Earharts, and the Eisenhowers when the Nation as a whole has not been conscious of the existence of our deep-rooted folk culture over some nine generations. Meanwhile, however, we bid farewell to the visitor in the Dutch country with those familiar words heard in Lancaster County: koom boll widder! (come soon again)—or, better, the idiom as it is used in the more eastern counties: koom ols widder (keep coming, and coming, and coming, and coming to see us ...).