Pennsylvania Dutch

Historical and sociolinguistic backgroundThe roots of the language known by its speakers as Deitsch, in English either Pennsylvania Dutch or Pennsylvania German, extend back to 18th-century Pennsylvania.Between 1710 and 1770, some 81,000 German-speaking migrants from mainly the Palatinate and adjacent regions in southwestern Germany, as well as smaller numbers from Alsace and Switzerland, arrived in America through the port of Philadelphia (Wokeck 1999).Most were farmers and craftspeople who settled in rural southeastern and south-central Pennsylvania, an area that still today is known as the Pennsylvania Dutch Country.Already by 1800, Pennsylvania Dutch-speakers began forming secondary settlements in western Pennsylvania (e.g., Somerset County) and further west, especially Ohio, and north into Southern Ontario in what was then known as Upper Canada.Other Pennsylvania Dutch speakers migrated southward along the eastern edge of the Appalachian Mountains establishing communities in Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina.Precise information on exactly where the original German-speaking immigrants to colonial Pennsylvania originated is lacking, but on the basis of passenger lists for the ships on which they traveled we have a good sense of approximately how many people came and in which years thanks to a 1999 study by the historian Marianne Wokeck.According to Wokeck (1999: 144-46), approximately two-thirds of the Pennsylvania Dutch founder population arrived in Pennsylvania before 1755, with a peak occurring between 1749 and 1755.After 1755, migration from German-speaking Europe declined dramatically and all but ceased with the onset of the American Revolution.Although in many cases we do not know the specific communities in Central Europe from which German-speaking migrants to colonial

Political science · Lexicography and Language Studies · Linguistics and Cultural Studies · Linguistics and language evolution

• Pennsylvania German; Its Relation to Other German Dialects

  Albert F Buffington•American Speech•1939

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