Our Amish Language — The Dial

The range of Pennsylvania Dutch vocabulary reflects the immediate, physical nature of my ancestors’ lives and work. Words that can convey colorful, varied descriptions, emotional nuance or complex ideas have always been limited and have only continued to wane. The contours of Pennsylvania Dutch words are harder and sharper than English ones. It’s hard to ask for a soft favor. Difficult to communicate affection, impossible to say the word love. We have no distinct word for it. One must use the standard German liebe, obtuse and antiquated in our mouths, or succumb to English, a concession. It is a tongue of commands and directives, probing questions about family relations, occupation in the most literal sense, and of following rules.

I’ve always assumed that the language’s oral nature has contributed to its concrete, factual diction. There are things you write that you almost never speak aloud. “The earth screams its thirst” might be an evocative way to describe a drought-ridden plain, but in conversation one is much more likely to simply bemoan the lack of rainfall and the dry appearance of the soil. I grieve this, but I also understand it. Language is above all, functional, and what didn’t serve my ancestors they discarded.

Harder for me to accept is how, today, English words are increasingly entering the language, edging out others. This is true for many traditional Amish communities that frequently interact with the wider world. Some English is present in every interview I conducted. Both Delores and Gabriel used “parents” instead of Eldre. Gabriel said “gevisit” and “borroweh” — Deitsch-ified versions of “visited” and “borrow” instead of bsucht and lehne, respectively. In the interview with my aunt Leona, she speaks almost an entire sentence in English, albeit with a Pennsylvania Dutch accent. I feel awkward about it. I want the interviews to show that the language does stand on its own, that it doesn’t need English to be functional. Sometimes I offer the Pennsylvania Dutch words to my interviewees as a suggestion, but I doubt that this is an advisable habit. No matter how zealous my efforts, I cannot repopulate the lexical landscape on my own.

Just before one of my trips to Montana to conduct interviews, I spoke to Rose Fisher, a linguist and language scientist at Michigan State University who studies Pennsylvania Dutch. She is also the mentor on my oral history project. When I talked about words that I remember using not many years ago having now fallen out of common practice, she emphasized that mixing Pennsylvania Dutch words with English is simply a common mode for this language. Sometimes, English words are absorbed into the language and become part of it, taking on a Pennsylvania Dutch flavor. The English “ready,” for example, has become reddi, and is used as a synonym for zeidich, meaning “ripe.” Louden points out that sometimes an English word strengthens and diversifies the Pennsylvania Dutch lexicon rather than diminishes it. Draage used to mean both “to carry” and “to wear.” The English “wear” has entered our speech in the form waere, keeping its English definition, and draage now exclusively means to carry. In this case, the phenomenon has increased rather than reduced precision.

A different issue for Pennsylvania Dutch is the increasing tendency to make English the default for communication, out of convenience or habit. One late afternoon in early winter, two of my mom’s siblings and their spouses, all in their 20s and early 30s, came over to hang out. They ended up staying for dinner after my uncle Josiah shot a deer half a mile away — he’d been trying to fill his tag for weeks. All four of them grew up far more Amish than I did, and all are fluent in Pennsylvania Dutch, but hardly a word of it was spoken. I occasionally made an attempt, but I also found myself slipping back into English like a bowling ball into the deep grooves of the gutter. 

On a different occasion, I asked one of my cousins if she speaks Pennsylvania Dutch with her sisters these days, who are all fluent.

“We just don’t. It isn’t how we connect anymore,” she said, an air of apology in her tone.

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So far I’ve interviewed 37 members of my family and community on camera. My interviewees’ level of comfort speaking in Pennsylvania Dutch for longer stretches of time, in a fairly formal setting, varies greatly. Many of those who now don’t often use the language claim that they will be shaky, unclear, a mess. All do better than they expect, even if 24-year-old Delores is more stilted, more careful than 58-year-old Leona.      

We spoke for almost two hours as she guided me through the trajectory of her life — from her first purchase of non-Amish clothing (a blue blouse with white floral embroidery on the front) to her late-discovered love of driving.

Delores, like me, has grown up in a changing community, a landscape of mixed languages. A few years ago, she married someone who speaks only English, and now she hardly has any reason to use Pennsylvania Dutch.

Leona, on the other hand, spoke English far less often than Pennsylvania Dutch until she was in her 30s — only when interacting with customers at the store she managed or shopping in town. This has changed gradually in the last 20 years, but she’s at no risk of forgetting the language that was her primary vehicle for communication for so long.

Of the interviews I’d done so far, the one with Leona was one of the most moving. She was my boss at the family grocery store and bakery where I worked as a teenager. We differed in the usual ways that teenagers differ from the middle-aged, as well as ways someone who was truly and wholly raised within the Amish might differ from someone who has only experienced the same immersion in infancy. Leona is frugal, in every dimension. Every swipe of her hand running a dishrag across the pocked butcher block table in the kitchen was parsimonious and each step she took over the store’s worn linoleum floor efficient. She skirted health codes to avoid paper towel and hot water waste. She told us frequently that “more girls in the kitchen means less work gets done,” leaping to send one of us home if the frequency of customers lagged. Over the years, dozens of my cousins worked for her. If we helped after school or in the summer, bagging cookies or breaking down cardboard boxes, she would reward us with snacks or cash under the table. With no children of her own, she embraced all of us as hers. At church, she could be counted on to pass around the pink spearmint candies she kept in the pocket of her Bible cover.

When I sat down with her, Leona was collected and linear in her storytelling. She had absorbed the list of questions I had sent her before the interview into a narrative that addressed them all and hardly required my prompting. We spoke for almost two hours as she guided me through the trajectory of her life — from her first purchase of non-Amish clothing (a blue blouse with white floral embroidery on the front) to her late-discovered love of driving. “Ich hab honestly really struggled, ich figger meh as menscht vun ne,” she said of making those big changes (“I honestly really struggled, I’d say more than most of them”). “I probably still lean a little more towards… I’m not quite so… ” she didn’t finish her sentence, but I knew what she meant. She has followed the community’s initiation of change but wouldn’t have asked for so much change herself. A lot of the others don’t feel this way; having the agency and permission to choose how they present themselves has been integral to finding an identity outside of Amish traditionalism. 

This is one of the reasons I wanted to interview so many people in my community, to capture the range of their attitudes. Most members don’t think of themselves as Amish anymore, in a strict sense, and describe themselves as ex-Amish or formerly Amish. Some like to say that they have Amish heritage or background. Others hold onto the label, saying they never formally left and still feel like the same person they were then. They may look different, they say, but that doesn’t change the fact of their Amish identity.

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The more I speak to older relatives about their traditional years, the more I’m reminded how many of their lives have been marked by injury and early death. There are a hundred ways that the work of farming and construction, and all manner of other physical tasks, can harm those who do them. Painful events are discussed matter-of-factly: Neither our language nor our culture invites dwelling in the complexities of grief and loss.

I’m asking for so much from them in these conversations, scavenging their memory banks, taking what I am given and then trying to get more. I don’t only want to know the words, but how they are used to convey the trivial details — the food, the clothes, the daily household tasks — as well as the profound sorrows and intense joys.

My dad described nearly dying several times, once as a child from getting kicked in the head and chest by a horse. He still has the scar where a nail from the horseshoe went through his lip. Later when he was 21 and working in the family’s sawmill, a pile of logs rolled on top of him, breaking his back and pushing him backwards so he narrowly missed being impaled by a forklift.

Leona spoke about her brother Vernon, three years older than her, who was thrown off a spring wagon at age nine, his body bleeding and shattered from the impact. My uncle Lloyd, then 15, laid him under a tree while he sprinted a mile back to the house where someone else ran to find a non-Amish neighbor whose phone they could use to call an ambulance. My Mammi (grandma) Orpha ran out to hold him as he struggled to breathe, and then he was gone, long before help arrived.

Leona also told me about her husband, my uncle Matthew, whom I never met. They had been married for 14 months when he died of lung cancer, presumably caused by weeks of exposure to industrial wood-staining agents while working on the interior of a log home without wearing a respirator. As I listened, I tried to keep my emotions, my welling tears, to myself, so as not to derail us — or perhaps because being emotional is not something I’ve learned to do with Leona.

I’m asking for so much from them in these conversations, scavenging their memory banks, taking what I am given and then trying to get more. It’s not just about recording the language, of course: If that were all I was interested in, I could have had them recite a vocabulary list. I don’t only want to know the words, but how they are used to convey the trivial details — the food, the clothes, the daily household tasks — as well as the profound sorrows and intense joys. It all sits side by side, in language inextricable from the events themselves: the old life and the new, my relatives’ different experiences, and their different perspectives on the same experiences.

Not long after interviewing Leona, I filmed three of my aunts talking about their mother, my grandmother. It wasn’t part of my original plan, but Mammi had recently passed away after grappling with dementia for years. Here was a way to fix inside digital resin some of her habits and propensities, through the words of three of her daughters. My aunts are commanding, and each in her own way can be intimidating. On that day, they had a lot to say. Even after I turned the camera off, they kept talking.

Two of my cousins, both women in their early 20s, came to sit behind me a few minutes into the interview, watching attentively. When I said we were finished, they jumped up and said they had something to say to the camera. They squeezed onto the soft brown couch between their mothers and said that hearing what Mammi had been like in her earlier years as a homemaker helped them understand why their own mothers were the way they were — sometimes difficult, always exacting, with high standards for the state of their homes. One said it made her realize these qualities are more special than she had thought — part of a lineage of women building their families and demanding only the best work from themselves. My aunts’ stories had rendered a sequence of Mammi’s hands moving without pause from early morning until the end of each day, when she would lean close to the kerosene lamp to continue mending or sewing by its feeble illumination.

I could recount these stories in detail here, but they would not convey the sounds of what I was told, the quality of my aunts’ voices in Pennsylvania Dutch and the implications of each chosen word. I confront this repeatedly as I work through the video footage of my interviews, layering English subtitles over Pennsylvania Dutch audio: how difficult it is to convey, in English, the full meaning of what a Pennsylvania Dutch speaker is saying.

But this project has also been a gift, reminding me that, even as Pennsylvania Dutch favors the concrete and the literal, it is full of its own nuance. When referring to how some of the younger children aren’t being taught the language, Leona says “S’schpeit mich.” It’s a phrase that doesn’t translate directly, expressing a combination of sadness and disappointment, usually with connotations of regret at an unfortunate outcome over which one has no control. After much deliberation, I end up opting for “saddened by,” even as I know that it doesn’t quite do what I want it to. I hope her tone and expression help convey the rest.