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Pennsylvania Dutch is the native language of over 400,000 Amish and Mennonite sectarians and stands as a shining example of linguistic resilience in the face of intense pressure to shift to English monolingualism. Unsurprisingly, English has nevertheless had a noticeable impact on the development of Pennsylvania Dutch over the course of its 300-year history in North America. The intensity of language contact has substantially grown in the past 50-100 years as the separatist Amish and Mennonites have had to negotiate with a mainstream English-speaking society that encroaches ever more on their traditional communities. In this talk, Rose Fisher will present some preliminary results of her dissertation research on grammatical gender inflection in one Amish and one Mennonite Pennsylvania Dutch variety. These results show that grammatical gender is undergoing a widespread paradigmatic shift which impacts nearly all noun phrases and has further implications for the plural inflectional paradigm as well. These developments are more advanced among the Amish as compared to the Mennonites of Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Because the sociolinguistic context of the Amish involves more intense contact with English than the Mennonite one does, this finding has interesting implications for English contact effects as well as for the robustness of morphological paradigms.
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Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Foster Auditorium, 102 Paterno Library,State College,PA,United States
