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Contrasting Spaces In Plautdietsch: Language Variation And Change, Roslyn Burns

Journal of Amish and Plain Anabaptist Studies

In this article, I explore linguistic variation in Plautdietsch through the lens of social variation and the resulting redistribution of linguistic forms across the community. Language change requires variation in a population and a social pathway for the variation to be distributed (or redistributed) across a community. This article explores two systems of variation in the Plautdietsch language as it is used across North America: the so-called traditional dialect system (based on descriptions from Thiessen 1977, Epp 1993, and Rempel 1995, among others), and the vowel system (based on Nieuweboer 1998, Burns 2016a,b, among others). I propose that linguistic diversification …