| Also Known As: German,Mennoniten Platt,Low German,Mennonite German,Plautdietsch
Description:
Plautdietsch, or Mennonite Low German, was originally a Low Prussian variety of East Low German, with Dutch influence, that developed in the 16th and 17th centuries in the Vistula delta area of Royal Prussia, today Polish territory. The word is etymologically cognate with Plattdeutsch, or Low German. Plaut is the same word as German platt or Dutch plat, meaning 'Low', and the name Dietsch corresponds etymologically to Dutch Diets ("Dutch") and German Deutsch ("German"), which originally meant 'ordinary language, language of the people' in all the continental West Germanic languages.
The language (or groups of dialects of Low German) is spoken in Canada, the United States, Mexico, Brazil, Bolivia, Paraguay, Honduras, Belize, and Argentina by over 300,000 Mennonites (Russian Mennonites). They are members of a religious group that originally fled from Holland and Belgium in the 1500s to escape persecution and eventually resettled in these areas. They introduced and developed their particular East Low German dialect, the so-called Weichselplatt, while they came to and lived in the Vistula delta area, beginning in the early-to-mid 1500s. These colonists from the Low Countries were..... full article at Wikipedia |
