The third sect of plain people is the Church of the Brethren or Dunkards. They stem from Alexander Mack, a Mennonite clergyman who seceded from the Mennonites in Schwarzenau, Germany in 1708 on his interpretation of baptism. The Mennonite commonly sprinkles in baptism. Mack taught that to be baptized properly one ought to be immersed, “dunked” if you please.
The Church of the Brethren have largely lost their “Plain Way” of life. Since they have gone in for higher education, their garb has largely disappeared. Few of the men wear beards and most of the Brethren use regular clothing. However, some still wear a garb similar to the Mennonites, the favorite color of the men being grey.
There is one sect of Dunkards, the Old Order River Brethren, very plain, just as plain as the Amish. These people are not a numerically large sect, for there are only approximately 12,000 of them in America. However, they deserve mention, for it was from them that President Eisenhower descended, whose grandfather, the Rev. Jacob Eisenhower, was a minister in the sect.
We, who live in Lancaster County, respect these plain folks most profoundly. They are our neighbors and we find them good neighbors. They have made a contribution to our agriculture, greater than their numbers warrant, to make our county the richest non-irrigated agricultural county in America.
They are a peace loving people whom you do not find in the courts either as prosecutors or defendants. All they ask of you and me is to be let alone to lead their lives in the light as God has given it to them to see the light.
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.