Speaker(s):
Mark L. Louden
Location:
Elizabethtown College, Bucher Meetinghouse, One Alpha Drive Elizabethtown, PA
Co-sponsor(s):
Elizabethtown College
Description:
BROWN BOOK AWARD LECTURE
Though often misunderstood and even scorned by outsiders, the Pennsylvania Dutch language is flourishing today among the Plain people, members of Amish and Old Order Mennonite groups. This presentation by Mark Louden will explore how Pennsylvania Dutch has not only been able to survive but in fact thrive since it developed in Penn’s Woods some two and a half centuries ago. We will consider a number of social and geographic factors that underlie the successful maintenance of the language, as well as the emotional and even spiritual significance it held and continues to hold for its speakers, past and present. The presentation will include examples from Pennsylvania Dutch literature that illustrate the expressive power of the language.
Mark L. Louden is a fluent speaker of Pennsylvania Dutch and has written extensively on the language and its speakers. He is the author of Pennsylvania Dutch: The Story of an American Language, which received the 2017 Dale Brown Book Award. Louden is the Alfred L. Shoemaker, J. William Frey, and Don Yoder Professor of Germanic Linguistics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, directs the Max Kade Institute for German-American Studies, and is an affiliate faculty member in the UW Religious Studies Program.
More information at https://www.etown.edu/centers/young-center/events.aspx