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Section III · The Language Today

The Language Today

By 1950, almost everyone agreed Pennsylvania Dutch was dying. Almost everyone was wrong. The story of how the language nearly disappeared and then began doubling every twenty years is one of the most surprising in American linguistics.

The 19th Century: The Golden Age

Through most of the 1800s, Pennsylvania Dutch was the dominant everyday language across much of rural southeastern and central Pennsylvania. It was spoken in homes, on farms, in shops, in courtrooms, and on the streets of towns like Reading, Allentown, Lancaster, and York. Children grew up speaking it as their first language and learned English at school. At its peak, it was likely the third most commonly spoken language in the United States, after English and Spanish.

Lancaster, Pennsylvania around the turn of the 20th century, when Pennsylvania Dutch was still widely heard on the streets.

The 20th Century: Pressure and Decline

The decline began in the cities first. By around 1900, Pennsylvania Dutch was already fading as a street language in urban centers like Allentown and Lancaster. Several forces accelerated this:

Among the Fancy Dutch (Lutheran and Reformed nonsectarians), the shift to English was nearly total within a generation or two after WWII. Many parents, often feeling guilty about it later, simply stopped passing the language on to their children. Today, most remaining nonsectarian speakers are elderly, and the variety is widely considered to be in danger of disappearing among this group.

The Surprising Twist

But here is where the story turns. While the Fancy Dutch were assimilating, the Plain Dutch — the Old Order Amish and Old Order Mennonites — were doing the opposite. Their religious commitment to separation from mainstream society meant they kept Pennsylvania Dutch as the everyday language of home, work, and community. They also kept Standard (or "Bible") German for worship, and they learned English for dealing with outsiders, making most of them functionally trilingual.

Because Amish and Old Order Mennonite families typically have very large numbers of children, and because the rate at which young people leave these communities is low, the population of Pennsylvania Dutch speakers has been roughly doubling every twenty years.

Linguist Mark Louden, who has studied Pennsylvania Dutch for decades, has observed that few language communities in the world are growing faster.

An Old-Order Amish farmstead — Pennsylvania Dutch is the everyday language of home, work, and worship in these communities.

Where It Is Spoken

Although the language was born in Pennsylvania, its center of gravity has shifted westward as Plain communities have spread. Today there are an estimated 300,000 to 400,000 native speakers across:

A diagram showing major Pennsylvania Dutch speaker communities across the United States and Ontario, Canada. Pennsylvania remains the linguistic homeland; Ohio and Indiana host major Plain settlements; Wisconsin has the fourth-largest Amish population.
Pennsylvania Dutch speakers today are concentrated across more than 30 U.S. states and parts of Ontario.

Internal Variation

After centuries of expansion, regional varieties have emerged. Ohio speakers may use English-borrowed words more readily than Pennsylvania speakers (e.g., car instead of Auto). Some Mennonite groups in Ontario retain Swiss German features inherited from their ancestors. Conservative Old Order Amish communities tend to preserve more archaic features, while progressive Mennonite groups incorporate more English influence.

A separate but closely related group, the Swiss Amish (called Shwitzer), speak two related but distinct varieties — Bernese Swiss German and Alsatian German — rather than Pennsylvania Dutch proper. They are descended from later Amish migrants who came directly from Switzerland in the 19th century.

Preservation Efforts

Outside the Plain communities, there are dedicated efforts to keep the language alive among nonsectarians:

The Future

The future of Pennsylvania Dutch is, paradoxically, bright. Linguists studying minority languages around the world note that few are growing as fast. Among Plain communities, children continue to acquire it as a first language, and adults continue to use it daily for work, worship, and family life. As long as the religious commitments and cultural separation of the Old Order communities persist, the language will continue to thrive — likely surpassing one million speakers later this century if current trends continue.

The Fancy Dutch dialect, by contrast, will likely fade as its remaining elderly speakers pass on, taking with it a particular regional flavor and a literary tradition that gave the language much of its written voice. What survives will be different from what came before — but it will survive, which is more than almost any other minority language in North America can claim.

The Bible and Religious Publishing in Deitsh

For most of the language's history, Pennsylvania Dutch had no Bible of its own. Amish and Old Order Mennonite worship has long relied on Martin Luther's sixteenth-century High German translation, even though many speakers acknowledge that Luther's German is increasingly difficult for them to follow. That gap — between the language of the home and the language of the pulpit — is where two very different modern translation projects have stepped in.

Di Heilich Shrift: The Pennsylvania Dutch Bible

The first complete Bible in Pennsylvania Dutch was published in 2013 under the title Di Heilich Shrift ("The Holy Scripture"), the culmination of decades of work by Hank Hershberger, his wife Ruth, and a team of Amish speakers working with Wycliffe Bible Translators. The project began with the New Testament, Es Nei Teshtament, first published in 1993; by the mid-2010s roughly 20,000 copies of the New Testament had been distributed within Amish communities.

The translation works directly from the original biblical languages — Masoretic Hebrew for the Old Testament and the Textus Receptus Greek for the New Testament — rather than retranslating from Luther or English. Hershberger's stated goal was to give Amish readers Scripture in the language they actually think and pray in. As he put it in interviews, "Our language is not that close to High German," and the resulting confusion had real theological consequences for ordinary readers.

The Pennsylvania Dutch Bible uses the Hershberger–Wycliffe spelling system that Hershberger and his team developed (covered on the Language page). Reception within Amish communities has been mixed. Some families embrace it for home devotions and report that reading Scripture in their mother tongue is emotionally powerful in a way the Luther Bible never was. Many church leaders, however, remain cautious — both because the translation is still relatively new and because the Luther Bible carries deep institutional weight. An audio recording of the Bible by Jacob Tice, released between 2022 and 2025, has further extended the translation's reach, and the text is now available as a free mobile app and on Bible.com.

Di Heilich Shrift — the first complete Bible in Pennsylvania Dutch, published 2013.

Jehovah's Witnesses and the Watchtower in Deitsh

A second, very different translation effort is being carried out by Jehovah's Witnesses, who publish a substantial body of religious literature in Pennsylvania Dutch through their official website jw.org. Since at least the late 2010s, selections of The Watchtower — Study Edition and the foundational "Bible Teachings" materials have been translated into Deitsh and made freely available online.

What makes the project unusual is who is doing the work. The translators are not professional linguists. They are a small team of native Deitsh speakers — two men and two women — who grew up Old Order Mennonite or Amish before becoming Jehovah's Witnesses. They live in Ohio, home to some of the largest Pennsylvania Dutch-speaking settlements in the country, and they were trained for the work in a six-week course organized by the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society. Each text is translated by three of the four team members, with the resulting drafts compared and reconciled before publication. The translations are written in the "plain" sectarian variety of Deitsh — the form actually spoken in Amish and Old Order Mennonite communities today.

This is one of the few sustained efforts to produce contemporary, non-academic prose in Pennsylvania Dutch on a regular publishing schedule, and it has had an unexpected side effect: it has given linguists a uniquely useful body of paired English-Deitsh texts to study, leading directly to the academic work described below.

The ENDE Corpus: Linguistics Catches Up

In 2022, researchers Barbara Hans-Bianchi and Camilla Balsamo at the University of L'Aquila in Italy released the ENDE Corpus (the English–Deitsh Translation Corpus) — the first annotated digital corpus of Pennsylvania German texts ever assembled. Built from 35 monthly issues of The Watchtower — Study Edition (May 2017 through March 2020) plus the Jehovah's Witness "Bible Teachings" materials, used with permission from the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania, it contains roughly 70,000 words of English source text aligned sentence-by-sentence with their Deitsh translations.

The corpus is freely available to researchers at deitsch.eu and it represents a quiet but significant milestone. For most of its existence, Pennsylvania Dutch has lived almost entirely outside of formal scholarly infrastructure. The ENDE corpus is the first time the language has been treated with the same computational-linguistic tools routinely applied to major world languages — lemmatized, part-of-speech tagged, and made queryable — and that, on its own, says something about where the language sits today: very much alive, increasingly written, and finally being studied as an idiom in its own right rather than a footnote to German.

Sources and Further Reading