[Lowlands-l] Amish & "low German"

[Lowlands Languages & Cultures]

On 10/8/2017 2:46 PM, Lowlands Languages & Cultures wrote:
> This article was on the front page of our local newspaper yesterday.  
> I hope it opens.
I received my undergraduate degree from Middlebury in 1967.  Years after 
I left the state of Vermont, I hung out with Mennonites in Ontario most 
of whom spoke or at least still understood the Plautdietsch they or 
their prents brought with them from Russia after WWII.  This dialect was 
absorbed by them during the century or so that they lived in the 
Danziger Bucht after fleeing persecution in Holland.  The founder, Menno 
Simons (right, you ask, why aren't they called Simonites?), was 
Friesian.  The Rhineland Amish were there after fleeing from persecution 
in Austria and Switzerland (hence the name Yoder).  I have a former 
brother-in-law named Yoder, and his son Kevin is a Congressman from 
Kansas.  There are perhaps half a million speakers of Plautdietsch 
mostly in South America, but substantial numbers remain in Ontario and 
especially Manitoba.  They are the only remaining speakers of the 
language which was the lingua franca of the Hanseatic League.

>
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-- 
Edwin Alexander



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