Rose Fisher: Amish Identity & The Pensylvania Dutch Language
JPAC Highlights
Amish Attitudes and Identity in Relation to Pennsylvania Dutch, by Rose Fisher, Journal of Plain Anabaptist Communities, volume 4, issue 1, 2023
Rose Fisher is a Ph.D. candidate in German Linguistics and Language Sciences at The Pennsylvania State University. Her dissertation is about the use of Pennsylvania Dutch (PD) by current members of the Old Order Amish and Old Order Groffdale Conference Mennonites in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.
One of the most universally recognized characteristics of the Amish and other Plain Anabaptist groups is the use of Pennsylvania Dutch, a language related to German – but as Mark Louden succinctly described it in his Johns Hopkins University Press book, Pennsylvania Dutch – it is an American language built from German parts.
In Rose Fisher’s article (“Amish Attitudes and Identity in Relation to Pennsylvania Dutch”) published in JPAC in 2023, Pennsylvania Dutch is: “the language of hearth and home for most Amish. As such, it serves the communication purposes of the in-group and is tightly interwoven with Amish identity” (p. 65). Here are excerpts from Rose Fisher’s article, to be found on pages 65-81 of volume 4, issue 1.
The objective of her study is the following: “For the purposes of this paper, I will focus on the Amish and leave aside other PD-affiliated groups such as nonsectarians and Mennonites. Though there are over 40 Amish affiliations making Amish life and societies very diverse (Kraybill et al., 2013, p. 138), all Amish groups speak a German-related vernacular language in addition to English, PD being the most common mother tongue (Kraybill et al., 2013, p. 122). (p. 66)
Fisher describes her research as “…not the first study to consider Amish identity and language attitudes (see, e.g., Moelleken, 1983; Johnson-Weiner, 1998; Page & Brown, 2006; and Brown, 2019); however, it is the first to my knowledge to consider these in relation to whether the subjects of interest are practicing members, former members, or nonpracticing descendants of a particular Anabaptist group.”
Three Questions
This leads to her three research questions:
- “How does language proficiency correlate with identity in each group?”
- “What role do spiritual and generational distance from Amish membership play in the extent to which members of each group identify as Pennsylvania Dutch/Amish?” and
- “What attitudes emerge in each group about language maintenance?” (p. 67).
Survey Group
To answer these questions, she surveyed 165 respondents, 40 of whom had an Amish background, including 9 members of an Amish affiliation, 14 who were former members (that is, they once belonged to an Amish church group, but no longer), and 17 with an Amish background but were never themselves members of an Amish church.
It is the answers of these 40 individuals that are reported in her JPAC article. Twenty-three of the respondents were male, and 17 were female. All of the current and former Amish participants speak Pennsylvania Dutch, while 4 of the 17 participants who are descendants, but were never Amish, speak the language.
Findings
As Figure 3 (p. 71) shows rather dramatically, current members associated speaking Pennsylvania Dutch with cultural identification as Amish, while former members and descendants did not do so to the same extent.
Particularly interesting, among the third group (those with an Amish background but who never belonged to an Amish church group) if they rated their grasp of Pennsylvania Dutch as fluent, they too rated their cultural identification with the Amish as high.
Yet, Fisher found a perplexing pattern whereby “while eight of the fluent participants and the two near fluent participants value communicating in the language only moderately or less….five participants with fair proficiency value communicating in PD ‘extremely’ or ‘very’ much…” (p. 73).
In general, the first group, those who are members of an Amish church, were more likely to value the maintenance of Pennsylvania Dutch than the other two groups. But Fisher also found that some from the second and third groups also had vested interests in maintaining the language.
In Conclusion
She concludes: “This observation parallels nicely with the experience of those who leave the Amish and integrate with mainstream society. In many of those cases, too, leavers and descendants of Amish groups are bound together by their shared heritage in ways that only become conscious after leaving.”
So, language and identity is really not so simple. This can be seen in the way Fisher wraps it up:
“Across all three research questions, group differences emerge. For research questions 1 and 2 – the interaction between PD proficiency, identity, and distance from the Amish -current members are highly proficient and identify strongly; former members are highly proficient and identify less strongly overall, with a higher proportion of “somewhat” responses; and descendants have the highest proportion of low proficiency speakers, but still almost half identify strongly. The most PD-proficient descendants tend to be the ones who identify strongly. Those generationally further removed are less likely to identify strongly with PD/Amish culture.” (p. 78)
“…Yet it is not the case that PD is only spoken by those who are currently Old Order Amish. How the interplay between Amish identity and language use impacts those who are not Amish but remain in some way affiliated with them has interesting implications for the multifaceted nature of identity. As a complex social, psychological, and emotional concept, identity can be better understood by investigations of this sort, which examine how diverse yet related ethnoreligious groups such as the broad array of Amish affiliations construct their identities and how those identities are bound to the minority language they speak.”
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