The Pennsylvania Dutch Dialects Project by Rose Fisher

Our next video from the Plain Roots conference is by Rose Fisher presenting on her Pennsylvania Dutch Dialects Project. In addition, this video also has another presentation on Teaching People to Write Pennsylvania Dutch by Rose Fisher and Eythana Miller.

With a Ph.D. in Germanic Linguistics and Language Science from Penn State University, Rose joined the Department of Linguistics, Languages, and Cultures at Michigan State in August, 2025. Rose’s research focuses on (socio)linguistic features of her native language, Pennsylvania Dutch. She teaches courses in MSU’s German basic language program (beginner through intermediate German) and also undergraduate and graduate content courses surrounding historical and contemporary (non-standard) German varieties and the linguistic features of those varieties. She is building the first ever corpus of spoken Pennsylvania Dutch dialects to preserve and examine their diversity and is deeply invested in legitimizing the language and helping speakers to understand it better.

The Pennsylvania Dutch Dialects Project has a variety of goals. Firstly it seeks to spread the word about how beautiful, interesting, and diverse the Pennsylvania Dutch language is. We wish to celebrate it and help people understand that it is a legitimate language (with many dialects!) and not just a broken form of English. Secondly, the project documents the different kinds of Pennsylvania Dutch and its speakers. Lastly, the project will publish Pennsylvania Dutch audio recordings, transcriptions, and translations to be used for linguistic research, teaching the language, or teaching people about the language. As the first spoken language corpus of its kind, this project fills a critical gap in linguistic research and documentation and provides a unique new way for speakers to understand the inner workings and history of their own language better.

In their talk, Teaching People to Write Pennsylvania Dutch, Rose and Eythana tackle the issue of whether and how to write in Pennsylvania Dutch. Many speakers have been told and perpetuate the mistaken belief that Pennsylvania Dutch “is not a written language.” There is no language on earth which inherently cannot be written. It simply needs a system of writing. In the case of Pennsylvania Dutch, there are actually various spelling systems already in existence. Rose and Eythana have chosen and expanded upon one of these systems and make a case in this talk for why this system serves the needs of (ex-)Anabaptist speakers well. We will also gauge interest in learning and using such a system in the various speech communities. 

You can learn more about both projects by listening to the video below.