Why are we called “Pennsylvania Dutch?”
Why are we called Pennsylvania Dutch and speak Pennsylvania Dutch when our ancestors were German, and our language is a German dialect? Read on….
Excerpt from “The Pennsylvania Dutch Experience 1681 – 1783” by James Fritz. Page 39. Published by The Pennsylvania German Society; Ephrata, PA in 2019.
“Author Steven M. Nolt provides the clarity to a bewildering and befuddling definition of the term “Pennsylvania Dutch.” To High German speakers, is “Dutch” a corruption of Deutsch or do popular writers mean Holland Dutch? Nolt provides the best explanation wherein he states, “Pennsylvania Dutch is often considered a misnomer (i.e., and assumed corruption of Pennsylvania Deutsch), it was actually the correct eighteenth-century term for the Rhine Valley immigrants. “Dutch” according to the Oxford English Dictionary, was the proper English term for the Rhine Valley inhabitants the whole way to Switzerland. Thus the English spoke of “Dutch” AND “Switzer” immigrants, where sources today would speak of the Germans as Swiss. (The English also spoke of the “Holland Dutch” or the “Low Dutch” to refer to those today known as Dutch.)”
