There are linguistic tics and habits that give away formerly Amish people immediately. I remember, for example, when I trained myself into saying “s_e_ven” instead of “s_a_ven.” I still think of it sometimes when I say the word, how it used to sound on my tongue, slow and sloping instead of quick and peaked, the way hooche Leit or “non-Amish people” always said it. This, and other quirks of pronunciation or vocabulary, are easy tells when accents have otherwise smoothed into plain old American and traditional clothing has been shed in favor of jeans and T-shirts. It’s not just speech, either — there’s something in people’s manner, the way they hold themselves. “I could be at a bus station anywhere in the United States and I can pick out an Amish person who’s not wearing Amish clothing,” Benjamin, who is married to my first cousin once removed, told me.
At first, the Libby community had no intention of relaxing its traditional practices, even though its theological beliefs were shifting. But it became harder and harder for some members to keep refusing modern conveniences (cars, radios) and clothing (zippers, bright colors), as they believed less and less that the state of their souls was tied to their outward appearance.
Most of my family fall into this category. We’ve been Amish as far back as our records go. My father’s Amish ancestor Samuel Mueller migrated to Pennsylvania in the mid-18th century. Nearly 250 years later, in 1992, my dad’s family established a new community in Libby, in Northwest Montana. Its main language was Pennsylvania Dutch, as in almost all Amish communities. The Libby community was intended to be traditionally Amish, but with more spiritual openness. Members might be led by the Holy Spirit to speak in tongues or prophesy, for example, or to dance during worship. Within a couple of years, the new community was interacting with local, non-Amish churches, and hosting new kinds of Bible studies and weekly meetings.
At first, the Libby community had no intention of relaxing its traditional practices, even though its theological beliefs were shifting. But it became harder and harder for some members to keep refusing modern conveniences (cars, radios) and clothing (zippers, bright colors), as they believed less and less that the state of their souls was tied to their outward appearance. Since everyone was modernizing, albeit at different speeds, members of the Libby community did not have to fear the serious consequences of formal public rebuke and ostracization that happen in other Amish communities when a member breaks church rules.
Parts of the Libby church split, with some families moving away because they wanted to modernize all at once, and others because they wanted change to happen more slowly. Those who remained continued the hard process of deciding what changes to allow in their own families. In 2004, the first and only major communal ruling came about, to allow cars. A few years later, people slowly began trying contemporary clothes. For the men, this wasn’t so dramatic — often a pair of jeans and a different buttoned shirt. For the women, it was more complicated. Many continued sewing their own dresses, but incrementally made items that were more colorful or elaborate, or had different silhouettes. Others tried simple, store-bought dresses or blouses with floor-length skirts. Despite my pleading, I wasn’t allowed to wear pants until I was nearly a teen.
English started to be used more frequently in Libby, alongside Pennsylvania Dutch. By the time I was born in 2000, members of the community were associating more regularly than ever with hooche Leit. Non-Amish religious leaders from town would meet with those who wanted their input on matters of faith. Running the family grocery store meant we all rubbed shoulders with customers who spoke no Pennsylvania Dutch. The community had a tiny selection of English-language VHS tapes and DVDs, along with a VCR, which was passed around family to family, slyly at first. (I remember watching Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” from behind the sofa soon after it came out, terrified.) All this exposure meant I learned English before I could remember doing so, and was fluent in both languages.
It was important to me that the interviews be in Deitsch. There are few audiovisual recordings of native speakers: Most traditional Amish don’t allow themselves to be photographed or video recorded, as it violates their interpretation of the scripture forbidding the making of any “graven image.” The interviews will serve as a repository of language and culture, and the way that both have evolved over the past decades.
In 2008, there was a first young person in the Libby community to marry someone who didn’t speak Pennsylvania Dutch. Five years later, another. My non-Amish sister-in-law joined family events at a young age; she and my brother married in 2016, when they were both 18. (They had met three and a half years previously, when her family moved into a house up the road from our church.) At our Miller Christmas party, or a summer backyard dinner, my relatives would speed through conversations in Deitsch (the name for our language, in our language) while she sat awkwardly at the edge. I stayed next to her, murmuring pieces of different exchanges to help her understand the tone of the room, the kinds of interactions that were unfolding. That was a decade ago; now that so many more cousins have married non-Amish partners, English pervades most family spaces and occasions.
When I was at college in California, far removed from the environment I had grown up in, I became fascinated by my community’s transition away from traditionalism. I wanted to find some way of recording it and so, in my last semester at Berkeley, I applied for a grant to fund an oral history project. I would interview around 30 people from my community on video, speaking with them in Pennsylvania Dutch, and translate every exchange into English for subtitles.
It was important to me that the interviews be in Deitsch. There are few audiovisual recordings of native speakers: Most traditional Amish don’t allow themselves to be photographed or video recorded, as it violates their interpretation of the scripture forbidding the making of any “graven image.” The interviews will serve as a repository of language and culture, and the way that both have evolved over the past decades. I now have over two dozen hours of native speakers telling stories, a treasure for my family and any other interested parties, and a record of what it’s like to move between such disparate worlds.
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I had arrived at Berkeley via a circuitous route. I left school at 12, a little earlier than is typical for Amish children. I then worked full-time at the family grocery store. A few years later, I moved to northern California to attend a ministry school, and heard two hosts at the restaurant where I worked mention California’s free community college. I thought I might as well try it. Though I had no plans to finish college, no idea what that even meant, I ended up transferring to Berkeley after two years.
It was there that I discovered how much I did not know about my mother tongue. There are a few lines that get passed around among the Amish like a hand-me-down shirt when it comes to their linguistic history, and none of them contains more than a kernel of verifiable information. But once I started looking, I found a wealth of scholars, university departments, articles, YouTube videos, even textbooks on Pennsylvania Dutch that I had never imagined existed.
One of the earliest critiques dates from the 1780s, when a German visitor to the U.S. described Pennsylvania Dutch as a “miserably broken mishmash of English and German” and a “bastard gibberish.”
When I first read historian and linguist Mark Louden’s diagnosis of Pennsylvania Dutch’s “image problem,” in his book Pennsylvania Dutch: The Story of an American Language, I found a name for what I’d observed and contributed to all my life. More than 250 years have passed since the first agrarian, working-class Germans and Swiss emigrated to the U.S., bringing with them a language that developed into the Pennsylvania Dutch we speak now. (It’s Pennsylvania Dutch not because of the Dutch that is spoken in the Netherlands, but because German- and Dutch-speaking peoples alike were called Dutchmen, in English, at the time of immigration.) Accents change with time, as does vocabulary. Pennsylvania Dutch and German are for the most part not mutually intelligible, even if they share many similar words and structures. Still, the Amish consistently compare their language unfavorably to standard German. A thousand times my cousins and I have spoken about our language derogatively, to each other or to non-Amish people, saying, “it’s just a mix of English and German” or “it’s wrong German.” We believed that over the past few hundred years we had disfigured what was originally correct. “There are so many English words mixed in, it’s really a dialect, not fully a language on its own,” my cousin Abigail said in her interview, when I asked her about her mother tongue.
The roots of this internalized stigma can be traced back to the language’s early days in the colonies of the “New World.” One of the earliest critiques dates from the 1780s, when a German visitor to the U.S. described Pennsylvania Dutch as a “miserably broken mishmash of English and German” and a “bastard gibberish.” From the 1840s until World War I, people from German-speaking Europe flooded into the country, with particularly high numbers settling in the Midwest. In Pennsylvania and neighboring states, when these newer immigrants encountered “Pennsylvania Dutch,” they scorned the language for its inclusion of English words, and because they thought it no longer sounded like the German that they spoke. (In fact, the origins of Pennsylvania Dutch are primarily in the Palatinate region of southern Germany, where the language already differed from standard German, as many regional varieties did.) Records of public meetings and community newspapers feature jabs at how far these sorry kinsmen have strayed from their heritage. Iterations of this attitude have persisted through eight generations and nearly 250 years.
There are other reasons for the stigma attached to Pennsylvania Dutch, including that the language is almost exclusively used orally. Originally, standard German would have served for writing purposes, for the limited number who were literate, but English slowly replaced it. (All Amish parochial schools conduct their instruction in English.) Partly because of its oral nature, the language is often described as a dialect. I grew up using this term, but upon encountering Louden’s work, I learned that “dialect” often functions more as an insult than a linguistically useful designation. Louden writes that “nonlinguists frequently assume that ‘written down’ languages are somehow more ‘correct’” than oral ones, and notes that there are no “objective criteria” that dictate whether something is a language or a dialect. In theory, any language that overlaps with another — to an unspecified degree — could be categorized as a dialect. This is not how the designation works in practice. Louden points out, for example, that Swedish and Norwegian are highly mutually intelligible, but neither is considered a dialect of the other, or of a parent language, primarily because each is associated with a separate nation-state. He describes how Luxembourgish went from being considered a dialect of German to a language in its own right, through a constitutional revision recognizing it as a national language in 1984. Nothing changed linguistically; a penstroke shifted designation and perception.
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.
I’m not surprised that Pennsylvania Dutch has not received similar recognition. Neither the early working-class immigrants nor the Amish today are apt to ask for acknowledgement, an official title, social status. They have always intentionally kept away from anything resembling pride or vanity; it is hardly surprising they have accepted and perpetuated this lowly descriptor and depiction of their language.
Still, I’ve been trying to reframe the way I think and talk about Pennsylvania Dutch, to catch myself in my reflexive denigrations of my mother tongue. Seeing it through the eyes of others has helped. Some years ago, during a conversation group I attended, hosted by Berkeley’s German department, I offhandedly referred to the language’s sloppiness and illegitimacy.
A nice graduate student named Brian stopped me and said, “Tell me a word in your language. Any word.”
I hesitated before choosing Schtor, an English loanword meaning “store.”
He repeated it back to me, mangling the pronunciation on purpose and then asked, “Was that correct?”
“Well, no,” I said.
“It is a ‘real’ language,” he said. “There’s a right way and a wrong way to speak it. You can’t just do any old thing.”
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.
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Eythana Miller is a writer from Montana who has lived in California since 2018. She is the maker of the Heritage in Translation oral history, a 2022 California Humanities Emerging Journalist fellow, and her work appears in CalMatters, The Daily Californian, and Edible Shasta-Butte. She graduated from UC Berkeley with a B.A. in Political Economy in 2025.