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The Pennsylvania Dutch live primarily in the Delaware Valley and in the Pennsylvania Dutch Country, a large area that includes South Central Pennsylvania, in the area stretching in an arc from Bethlehem and Allentown in the Lehigh Valley westward through Reading, Lebanon, and Lancaster to York and Chambersburg.
Pennsylvania Dutch is mainly derived from Palatine German, spoken by 2,400,000 Germans in the Rhine-Neckar Metropolitan Region, a region almost identical to the historical Palatinate. [11] There are similarities between the German dialect that is still spoken in this small part of southwestern Germany and Pennsylvania Dutch.
These European Germans immigrated to Pennsylvania Dutch cities, where many came to prominence in matters of the church, newspapers and urban business. [13] [12] After the 1871 unification of the first German Empire, the term "Dutchlander" came to refer to the nationality of people from the Pennsylvania Dutch Country. [1] [2] [3]
Many Pennsylvania Dutchmen are descendants of Palatines who settled the Pennsylvania Dutch Country. [6] The Pennsylvania Dutch language, spoken by the Amish and Pennsylvania Dutch in the United States, is derived primarily from the Palatine German language which many Mennonite refugees brought to Pennsylvania in the years 1717 to 1732. [65]
The Amish (/ ˈɑːmɪʃ /; Pennsylvania German: Amisch; German: Amische), formally the Old Order Amish, are a group of traditionalist Anabaptist Christian church fellowships with Swiss and Alsatian origins. [2] As they maintain a degree of separation from surrounding populations, and hold their faith in common, the Amish have been described by ...
Collectively, they came to be known as the Pennsylvania Dutch (from Deutsch). [46] [47] Etymologically, the word Dutch originates from the Old High German word "diutisc" (from "diot" "people"), referring to the Germanic "language of the people" as opposed to Latin, the language of the learned (see also theodiscus). Eventually the word came to ...
American German. Over 50 million Americans claim German ancestry, which makes them the largest single claimed ancestry group in the United States. Around 1.06 million people in the United States speak the German language at home. [6] It is the second most spoken language in North Dakota (1.39% of its population) [7] and is the third most spoken ...
The Pennsylvania German Society is a non-profit, educational organization dedicated to studying the Pennsylvania German people and their 330-year history in the United States and Canada. The society works to preserve and promote the history, culture, religion, and dialect of the Pennsylvania Germans, also commonly known as the Pennsylvania Dutch .