Willkumm zu padutch.net / Welcome to padutch.net

Willkumm zu padutch.net! This website features a number of texts and recordings documenting the history of the Pennsylvania Dutch language. The primary function of padutch.net is to serve as a companion reference for the book, Pennsylvania Dutch: The Story of an American Language, which first appeared in January 2016 with the Johns Hopkins University Press. A paperback edition is now available. Pennsylvania Dutch is the 2017 recipient of the Dale W. Brown Book Award for Outstanding Scholarship in Anabaptist and Pietist Studies, which is sponsored by the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies at Elizabethtown College.

Each chapter of the book includes excerpts from a number of texts and recordings in Pennsylvania Dutch, Pennsylvania High German, and also Dutchified German, a mainly written variety intermediate between Pennsylvania Dutch and Pennsylvania High German. Many texts from the book and others are accessible on this site. For those interested in detailed information about the phonetics of Pennsylvania Dutch, visitors may access the Pronunciation section from the main menu.

The materials accessible on padutch.net also support an ongoing research project, the Pennsylvania Dutch Documentation Project, which is sponsored by the Max Kade Institute for German-American Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. The Max Kade Institute (MKI) is home to the world’s largest archive of interviews made with speakers of North American German varieties, including Pennsylvania Dutch. This archive was completely digitized as part of a grant project, American Languages: Our Nation’s Many Voices Online, which was funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services. Samples of MKI’s German-American recordings, including Pennsylvania Dutch recordings, are now accessible on the pages devoted to language on the MKI website. In addition to audio excerpts from the Max Kade Institute’s sound archive, padutch.net features a variety of texts in and about Pennsylvania Dutch from historical newspapers.

On the Anabaptist Historians blog, I publish essays on Pennsylvania Dutch language and culture that complement the materials on this site.

Please email me with any questions or comments: mllouden@wisc.edu.

Mark L. LoudenAlfred L. Shoemaker, J. William Frey, and Don Yoder Professor of Germanic LinguisticsUniversity of Wisconsin–Madison