Our Amish Language: Recording a Dialect in Transition
I grew up in the Libby Amish community as it shifted from traditional practices to modern life, watching our Pennsylvania Dutch language evolve alongside our changing culture. Now, I am documenting these transitions through video interviews in Deitsch to preserve our unique linguistic heritage before it fades away entirely.
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.
- skissane
I had not heard of the Libby (Montana) community before.
But from the description in the article, it is clear they are at the liberalising end of the Amish.
And one thing that almost certainly follows from their liberalisation, is their TFR (Total Fertility Rate) is going to gradually converge with mainstream society – not necessarily with the very low levels associated with the completely secular, but at least with the levels associated with mainstream conservative evangelicalism – modestly above the secular average, a lot lower than the Old Order Amish average.
By contrast, groups at the most conservative end of the Amish–e.g. the Swartzentruber–have a very high TFR, and it seems unlikely it is moderating to any significant degree; and also I'm sure their Pennsylvania Dutch is much healthier as a language.
Comparing Pennsylvania Dutch to Yiddish, I think the fact that Yiddish-speaking Hasidic communities (e.g. Kiryas Joel) use it as a written language, e.g. for their newspapers and community notices, and also a language of instruction in schools, puts Yiddish on a much more secure footing. I wonder why the Amish have never made much effort to write their distinctive language down? As far as I know, there isn't any theological objection, just a cultural habit they've stuck with. (They could keep standard German for their liturgy, just as the Hasidim use Hebrew not Yiddish for theirs.) I wonder if at some point, any of them will realise that investing in their distinctive lan […]
- woodruffw
I really enjoyed this article. I grew up with a small amount of a similarly uncommon (outside of religious groups) Germanic language, one that I’ve learned more of as an adult, and many of the experiences (around struggling to get people to speak it, even when they know it) ring true.
> 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.
A shprakh iz a dyalekt mit armey un flot!
- schoen
I asked an LLM to help me find the standard German equivalent for "hooche Leit",
and it said "hohe Leute" 'high people' (here in the sense of 'fancy people'), which of course doesn't have the same connotation, but that's the etymological sense.
- thomasfromcdnjs
I've had a bit of fun working with low resource languages (aboriginal australian), and enjoying the result from Facebook's No Language Left Behind project -> https://huggingface.co/facebook/nllb-200-distilled-600M
I'd recommend giving it a squiz. (I assume Amish has a large corpus)
- zkmon
> But it became harder and harder for some members to keep refusing modern conveniences
I read about Amish people and I have very high respect for their traditions. Sometime I believe that's exactly how the society should be guided. It's not about getting harder and harder to keep refusing the modern practices. It is about slowing the adoption of such practices to ensure that the community still stays above the individual. I hope they can slow it down as much as possible.
"Individualism is frowned upon" - that's a great way to keep the community stronger. I experienced this in my community from South India. People are hardly known by their own names. Everyone was called by their family name only or something like "grandson of XYZ".
"Too much education causes separation" - another true observation, affects Indian families a lot. Each generation is alienated from its previous generation, only because of education, jobs and foreign living.