#mennonite

Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. This buggy is one of the several Mennonite types.

Record Group 83: Records of the Bureau of Agricultural EconomicsSeries: Photographs Relating to Programs and Activities

Just wondering, how do men feel about pregnancy?

I was watching something and as soon as the guy felt the baby’s limbs through his wife belly, he was immediately grossed out with his wife and stepped back.

That hurt my heart. If someone ever did that to me while I was pregnant, I’d probably cry my eyes out for days.

One of my best friends in college (and now) was a Bruderhof/Hutterish girl in my department. We went to a Catholic university, and we bonded over being outsiders-- Christians, but a kind of Christian others find weird; Christians, but not the majority. We met-met and became instant friends on the last day of our Junior year after being in a lot of the same classes, but never really talking. Our senior year, we connected again and were in a ton of the same classes, for one of which we spent a lot of time studying/reading together.

Anabaptist life and intentional community reminded me of Orthodox monasticism, and because the Hutterites are Slavic, we had a lot in common, culturally. I admire her so much. I stay with her at her community sometimes, and sometimes she'll go to a monastery with me.

Sorry to Pennsylvaniapost again but here are some Pennsylvania Dutch facts for those who'd like to know but have never been here

There's quite a few of us! There's isn't an exact headcount though, but I'd estimate at least 500,000. Pennsylvania Dutch is not only a language but also an ethnicity. I'd never call myself German-American for example, Pennsylvania Dutch people have been around in Pennsylvania for a pretty long time and developed a lot of our own stuff here. We all come from the same region of southwestern germany. Interestingly, a bunch of people left from there around the same time, leading to the Russian Mennonites, settling in Ukraine and many ending up in Mexico and Central America, as well as Central Asian Germans.

Pennsylvania Dutch also aren't just in Pennsylvania! There's folks all the way out to Nebraska. The more extreme Amish you are, the further west you go.

We aren't all Amish or Mennonite, in fact most of us are not! Amish and Mennonites are Anabaptist groups, which means they don't baptize babies. If you've ever heard of Rumspringa (running around is what is means), it's when Amish teens go out in the world and do stuff they haven't grown up doing to see if they'd like to leave the fold or be baptized and remain. The difference is that Mennonites are less 'plain' (they do more worldly stuff than the Amish do- both together tend to be called 'The Plain People.') Mennonites will drive cars and wear different clothes.

You can tell Amish and Mennonites apart by their clothes! To start, Amish guys Look Amish (bowl cut, beard, suspenders, hat, etc.) Mennonite guys tend to look like normal church dads. Mennonite women sometimes wear cotton dresses called 'cape dresses,' that are in different colors and patterns, with a cap. Other times they just wear a skirt and top with a little veil over their heads. Amish women from my area in PA usually wear solid colors, usually shades of blue or dark purple, with black aprons and heart-shaped white caps (not bonnets- bonnets are black and for shade, caps are worn all the time. Sometimes Amish ladies wear turban-looking scarves on their heads instead of nice caps when they're at work. Spelled 'kapp' in penna dutch.) Lancaster Amish have the heart shaped caps, but Ohio Amish wear round ones. (my experience is from growing up right outside of Amish country.) All plain dress is practical for work- that's is purpose. At Amish stores, for example, Carhartt is super popular and there is a non-neglible number of Mennonite women who look what I'd call 'butch.'

Amish people are very normal here. It's kind of funny and icky-feeling sometimes when tourists ogle them. Also, they don't live in caves. Most Lancaster Amish have electric lights, although never televisions. As a supplement to buggies (not carriages- that's 'fancy' terminology and therefore never used), sometimes people ride scooters. Amish people don't ride bikes- instead they ride scooters with bike tires because bikes were a luxury item when they were invented. I once saw an Amish guy scootering away from a gas station with a bag of Doritos in his basket. Amish people very much live in the modern world, and their culture is not a "back in time" thing at all. Amish people frequently ride trains and can ride in cars, as long as they don't drive them. Amish taxi driving is a cottage industry. Pretty much all technology is fine if used for work. Leading into my next point:

Amish people especially work incredibly hard at very hard work. They are also huge hustlers and have a lot of side hustles. This is why Amish folks sell puppies, run roadside fruit stands, sell quilts (making them is a tradition of ours) and I've even seen pictures of Amish folks selling weed. There's a lot of kids to support and they hustle hard. This is mostly just an Amish thing now, but my maternal grandfather came from this kind of family. He had eleven siblings who all worked from very young ages and he became a carpenter as an adult.

Amish folks are pretty shy and don't really like talking to English people. Also, definitely don't photograph them, that is a huge cultural taboo for them that they really do not like as a whole. Mennonites are friendlier to people outside the fold.

There is technically a split by religion between the Plain Dutch, which are Amish and Mennonites, and the Fancy Dutch, who are Lutheran and baptize babies. (Me and most of us!) An alternate name is "Gay Dutch," which really amuses me as an ethnicity/heritage name. All of us have the same heritage, and from the people in my town and others I've met, we tend to have sharp jaws but really full, round cheeks. I am told I look Amish a lot because I have long hair and this face shape. Despite being German, blonde hair is not overly common. (there is of course loads of variation, this is just a generalization!) To Amish people, everyone who is not Amish is English. Fancy Dutch and my friend from Turkmenistan are equally English. The origin is to separate those who speak English as their first language, and Amish raised with Pennsylvania Dutch.

The reason it's Pennsylvania Dutch instead of Deutsch is because in the Pennsylvania Dutch language it doesn't sound like Deutsch at all! In Pennsylfanisch Deitsch, it's pronounced like "daitch," with the "ai" in the middle. The language is very healthy among Amish and Mennonites who learn it as a first language, especially since Amish have a lot of children, but between the 1920s and '40s it started to wither away among the fancy dutch population. There were a lot of factors that contributed to it, but WW2 definitely did not help. I am about three generations removed from this, as my great-grandparents spoke the language. My maternal grandfather only knew the curse words, lol. There is an effort to bring it back for adults, as there are several community centers and a class at a local university. There seems to be no bilingual education for Fancy Dutch children, not even in churches unfortunately. Also, fun fact, Penna. Dutch Speakers and Yiddish speakers can understand each other!

However, we definitely do have accents. People closer to the language tend to have a stronger accent compared to those raised speaking English. There are several direct translations from german that remain in our speech, such as "what for..." to mean "what kind of" and "outen the lights" (turn the lights off.) Sometimes we'll also say direct words, like "kutzing" for vomiting, but not many of these remain. Other phrases we use are "right like" to mean "just like," as well as some of our own grammar even. For example, we tend to invert actions in sentences sometimes, like this-

"Throw the horse some hay over the fence" in standard English vs "throw the horse over the fence some hay" in Penna Dutch English. We also use 'yet' to mean still, in contexts like, "does she work at the store yet?" (not meaning, 'has she started work there yet?' but 'does she remain working there?') The classic one that a lot of people use even if they don't think they have an accent is "awhile," used to signify something simultaneously. For example, "you just sit in the living room, I'll start dinner awhile."

Something that a friend of mine makes fun of me for is what Wikipedia calls our "specific intonation patterns for questions." That's the way it's phrased on there seriously, very vague, because it's very unique and hard to describe. I'm not sure it would sound like a question if you were to hear it for the first time. In standard american english, there's a uniform rise in intonation towards the end of the question. In Penna Dutch English, it alternates between high and low tone between words, always ending on low. I imagine to the untrained ear it would sound like the tone you use with heavy sarcasm. We also don't use it all the time. In writing this post, I was thinking about the examples I used for 'yet' above and how I'd tell those apart. For "does she remain working at the store" I'd probably use Pennsylvania Dutch intonation, but I'd say "has she started work there yet?" with a uniform rise. I have no idea why this seems to me intuitively to communicate the difference in meaning- it must be ingrained in me from learning to speak from my parents, and I'd really like to know if this is common or universal.

There are a couple distinctive Penna Dutch surnames! Yoder and Stoltzfus especially are Amish names in particular. Among fancy Dutch, it's not uncommon to have straight up German names (example: Zimmerman, meaning carpenter), or german names that have been anglicized (Stuhlmacher--> Stoolmaker, meaning "chair-maker.) There are also quite a few names ending in -baugh, as well as some that are based on german names that have no equivalent in English, so they're essentially just made up and totally unique. My mom has one of these but it's so uncommon it would make her very easy to find, so I'm not going to.

Here's some little cultural stuff that we keep with us. Generalization again, but just things I've noticed. We are not touchy-feely people as a rule. I did not cry when my grandmother died, even though I loved her very much, and the idea of listening to music just to cry is odd to me. I was raised in a family that was more cool with feelings than most- my mom is the "sensitive" one in her family, and her siblings will chide her for being sentimental at all. I was also raised as female, which is important to add too. Of course we feel the full spectrum of feelings but it is not common at all to show them. My college was recently visited by a council of elders from a native nation in Oklahoma, and in discussing the death of her husband two years ago, one of the elders began to cry at the mention of him, as well as some of the others on the council that had been his friend. That was a bit of a shock to me since that's just not something that has been done in my upbringing. My grandmother did not cry at her husband's funeral, for example. My paternal grandfather's closest friend passed away, and aside from sending me an email about the lifespan of their friendship and mentioning it once, he never made his grief known more than that.

Kind of a wild card, but motorcycle riding is huge among fancy Dutch men. My grandfather, now deceased, and my uncle are both avid riders, and watch for motorcycles signs are posted around the road at every turn. The motorcycles tend to be the older kind of wide Harley-Davidson or similar brands, because there's a factory nearby us. The leather gear is absolutely part of the tradition, and many men are members of motorcycle clubs. Motorcycles and buggies are both very dangerous on the road, so if you visit be careful driving.

In terms of religion among fancy Dutch, I was born Lutheran but converted to Islam in my teens. I still think I have a very Lutheran approach to Islam, haha. Lutheranism is the first branch of protestantism that split off from catholicism, and it shows. While we can have female pastors and are mostly cool with gay folks, the rituals are very much the same. The liturgy would be familiar to catholics. (Perhaps older catholics more so, since lutheranism retains "and also with you" instead of that "and with your spirit" shit.) Communion is taken every time you go to church, for example, unlike many other protestant denominations. Having been to catholic church a few times, I can say that the lutheran sermons I've heard are much better-written than catholic homilies. I think it's something about being in the world, perhaps. The approach among most to religion is not overly zealous in the lutheran community. In my experience, church for everyone in my family on both sides is more to engage with community and familiar ceremony than actual passion and faith. This is to say that while Pennsylvania Dutch may be religious, we are not very spiritual and don't really engage in a personal relationship with God like other denominations might.

We're very practical and tend to hoard things, but I'm sure that's a global tendency. Drinking is not really a cultural sport especially with more traditional and older people. Being on time and prepared is a huge thing, which I'm sure would be familiar to continental Germans.

We have our own art styles too! It's called fraktur, which is a way of illuminating texts and decorating things like birth certificates. It's often used for birth certificates and family trees.

We also have a traditional kind of 'barn star,' called the hex sign:

They're often on the sides of barns to decorate them. Amish do not use these. (fancy.)

Food culture is very plain, much like other stuff about us. Huge staples are pork and apples, as well as other sausage concoctions. Famous are scrapple, a pork and oat breakfast sausage meatloaf thing, and hogmaw, sausage and cabbage and other stuff stuffed into a pig's stomach. Snitz and knepp (literally pork and apples with dumplings) is another tradiitonal dish. Desserts include shoo-fly pie, a molasses cakey-pie and whoopie pies are usually attributed to us although I'm not sure if that's accurate. In Penna Dutch country we also make a whole lot of snack foods, like Herr's chips, martin's chips, nissin ramen, snyder's pretzels, and surprisingly hello panda snacks, to name a few. We also have a lay's factory in my country which I'm willing to bet supplies a lot of the east coast, as well as a roastery for starbucks coffee. Essentially, we make/process a lot of food.

Farming is pretty common and we tend to grow corn and soy commercially, although roadside stands with vegetables and especially apples and peaches are very common. The terrain is super super green! We have a lot of trees and forests, but I want to emphasize for people from dry climates especially just how green it is here. Bright, bright green grass and trees all summer long. There's rolling hills everywhere, which kind of look like ocean waves of land. It's also pretty humid in the summer, like much of the US east.

Where I'm from in Pennsylvania also has plenty of other residents: we're pretty close to to the Maryland border, so we have a lot of Marylanders who move up and commute to Baltimore for work. That gives us a pretty sizable Catholic and Black population in my town at least. We do have immigrants in Penna Dutch country- I met a lot of people with immigrant parents in high school, (I have Quebecois, Turkish, and Sudanese friends I met there to name a few) but none really from the same places. I can't say at least where I grew up that immigrant populations are unilaterally from one place and form a cohesive community.

So yeah, that's a little bit about Pennsylvania Dutch folks! I'll end with our flag:

It has some questionable design choices to say the least, but the most important part is the motto which reads:

Dear God in heaven,

leave us Pennsylvania Dutch what we are.

Old Canada Series