Welcome to the homepage for the Pennsylvania Dutch Dialects Project. Mir sin so froh, as du do bischt!
We are a research group at Michigan State University that focuses on all things Pennsylvania Dutch. We want to make it easier to learn about Pennsylvania Dutch and come up with new and fun ways for speakers, researchers, and language enthusiasts more broadly to engage with the language.
The Pennsylvania Dutch Dialects Project has a variety of goals. Here are some of the most important ones:
- Spread the word about how beautiful, interesting, and diverse the Pennsylvania Dutch language is. We wish to celebrate it and help people understand that it is a legitimate language (with many dialects!) and not just a broken form of English. Pennsylvania Dutch has been influenced by English as any language is when it is in close contact with another language, but it is fundamentally a German variety that, unlike most other German varieties, is uniquely situated in North America.
- Document the different kinds of Pennsylvania Dutch and its speakers. According to the counts from the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies, there are Amish people in 32 American states, 3 Canadian provinces, and Bolivia (https://groups.etown.edu/amishstudies/population-2025/). This means that the language is spoken all over North America. But it’s not just the Amish that speak Pennsylvania Dutch. There are also Mennonites, Lutherans, German Reformed, and other groups that speak it. As anyone who speaks the language will tell you, people in different places and groups do not all speak the same. We want to begin documenting the similarities and differences between all these different groups and areas and the way they speak.
- Make Pennsylvania Dutch audio recordings, transcriptions, and translations available to be used for linguistic research, teaching the language, or teaching people about the language. For example, here is a demo activity that has been created using a snippet from a recorded interview which could be used for teaching Pennsylvania Dutch.
We are still working on developing the transcriptions and translations (a very time-consuming process!) for publication. This website will serve as an access point for this database when it is finished.
Here is what the transcriptions and translations look like in ELAN (the program we use for doing this):
If you or someone you know is a Pennsylvania Dutch speaker who is interested in contributing their voice or thoughts to this project, please make a submission here. We are also looking for research assistants who can speak Pennsylvania Dutch and would be interested in contributing to the transcription/translation effort. That just means helping us write down in Pennsylvania Dutch (and translating into English) what people in an audio recording are saying. This is a great opportunity to learn how to write in the language! Please reach out to us and let us know if you’re interested. This is a paid opportunity.
Undergraduate and graduate students and other interested parties with or without experience with Pennsylvania Dutch and/or German are also encouraged to reach out and express interest in participating in this project.