Includes proceedings, addresses and annual reports.

Cover -- Half-title -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- Preface -- Acknowledgments -- INTRODUCTION: Pennsylvania German Studies -- PART 1 HISTORY AND GEOGRAPHY -- 1. The Old World Background -- 2. To the New World: Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries -- 3. Communities and Identities: Nineteenth to the Twenty-First Centuries -- PART 2 CULTURE AND SOCIETY -- 4. The Pennsylvania German Language -- 5. Language Use among Anabaptist Groups -- 6. Religion -- 7. The Amish -- 8. Literature -- 9. Agriculture and Industries -- 10. Architecture and Cultural Landscapes -- 11. Furniture and Decorative Arts -- 12. Fraktur and Visual Culture -- 13. Textiles -- 14. Food and Cooking -- 15. Medicine -- 16. Folklore and Folklife -- 17. Education -- 18. Heritage and Tourism -- 19. Popular Culture and Media -- References -- Contributors -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- Q -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Y -- Z -- Color plates follow page

This comprehensive anthology of original Pennsylvania German writings makes accessible a literature that is becoming increasingly rare. The Buffington/Barba system of German sound values has been applied to help the reader understand and appreciate the selections, which provide a view to virtually every facet of Pennsylvania German life.

The fascinating story of America's oldest thriving heritage language. Winner of the Dale W. Brown Book Award by the Young Center for Anabaptists and Pietist Studies at Elizabethtown College While most world languages spoken by minority populations are in serious danger of becoming extinct, Pennsylvania Dutch is thriving. In fact, the number of Pennsylvania Dutch speakers is growing exponentially, although it is spoken by less than one-tenth of one percent of the United States population and has remained for the most part an oral vernacular without official recognition or support. A true sociolinguistic wonder, Pennsylvania Dutch has been spoken continuously since the late eighteenth century despite having never been "refreshed" by later waves of immigration from abroad. In this probing study, Mark L. Louden, himself a fluent speaker of Pennsylvania Dutch, provides readers with a close look at the place of the language in the life and culture of two major subgroups of speakers: the "Fancy Dutch," whose ancestors were affiliated mainly with Lutheran and German Reformed churches, and traditional Anabaptist sectarians known as the "Plain people"—the Old Order Amish and Mennonites. Drawing on scholarly literature, three decades of fieldwork, and ample historical documents—most of which have never before been made accessible to English-speaking readers—this is the first book to offer a comprehensive look at this unlikely linguistic success story.