Ohio Amish Women in the Vanguard of a Language Change: Pennsylvania German in Ohio

Ness, Silke Van

doi:10.2307/455871

Cited by 12 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 5 publications

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“…There is also evidence that women lead change in bilingual settings involving language pairs other than Spanish/English. In a study of Pennsylvania German spoken in Ohio, Van Ness (1995) found that young Amish women were leaders in the increased use of the neuter pronominal form es instead of the feminine form sie.…”

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confidence: 99%

Social class and gender impacting change in bilingual settings: Spanish subject pronoun use in New York

Shin

Otheguy

2013

Lang. Soc.

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A B S T R A C TThis study examines the role of social class and gender in an ongoing change in Spanish spoken in New York City (NYC). The change, which has to do with increasing use of Spanish subject pronouns, is correlated with increased exposure to life in NYC and to English. Our investigation of six different national-origin groups shows a connection between affluence and change: the most affluent Latino groups undergo the most increase in pronoun use, while the least affluent undergo no change. This pattern is explained as further indication that resistance to linguistic change is more pronounced in poorer communities as a result of denser social networks. In addition we find a women effect: immigrant women lead men in the increasing use of pronouns. We argue that the women effect in bilingual settings warrants a reevaluation of existing explanations of women as leaders of linguistic change. (Language change, social class, gender, bilingualism, Spanish in the US, pronouns)* I N T R O D U C T I O NIn monolingual settings, gender and social class have been shown to be relevant variables in our understanding of language change. But are these variables also relevant to language change in bilingual settings and, more specifically, in immigrant bilingual settings? In this article we examine an ongoing change in the Spanish spoken in New York City (NYC), and find evidence that this change occurs most rapidly among the more affluent Latino communities and among women.

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Social class and gender impacting change in bilingual settings: Spanish subject pronoun use in New York

Shin

Otheguy

2013

Lang. Soc.

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“…The majority of PD speakers today, however, belong to conservative, separatist Anabaptist groups such as the Amish and Old Order Mennonites. In light of the growing number of these sectarian speakers and the moribund status of non-sectarian PD, linguists have shifted their attention to the former (Knodt 1986;Louden 1989;Louden and Page 2005;Meister Ferré 1994), including work that has begun to investigate linguistic variation based on geographical location and other sociolinguistic variables (Brown 2011(Brown , 2019Keiser 2001Keiser , 2012Louden 2016;Reed and Seifert 1954;Van Ness 1995). The data that we analyze in this paper likewise come from informants who speak sectarian PD.…”

Section: Plurality In Pennsylvania Dutch: Allomorphic Alternationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Why Is Inflectional Morphology Difficult to Borrow?—Distributing and Lexicalizing Plural Allomorphy in Pennsylvania Dutch

et al. 2022

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In this article we examine the allomorphic variation found in Pennsylvania Dutch plurality. In spite of over 250 years of variable contact with English, Pennsylvania Dutch plural allomorphy has remained largely distinct from English, except for a number of loan words and borrowings from English. Adopting a One Feature-One Head (OFOH) Architecture that interprets licit syntactic objects as spans, we argue that plurality is distributed across different root-types, resulting in stored lexical-trees (L-spans) in the bilingual mental lexicon. We expand the traditional feature inventory to be ‘mixed,’ consisting of both semantically-grounded features as well as ‘pure’ morphological features. A key claim of our analysis is that the s-exponent in Pennsylvania Dutch shares a syntactic representation for native and English-origin roots, although it is distinct from a ‘monolingual’ English representation. Finally, we highlight how our treatment of plurality in Pennsylvania Dutch, and allomorphic variation more generally, makes predictions about the nature of bilingual morphosyntactic representations.

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“…The literature on Ultra-Orthodox (e.g., Davidman 1991;El-Or 1994;Fader 2013;Neriya-Ben Shahar 2008 and Amish women (e.g., Graybill 2009;Johnson-Weiner 2001;Jolly 2007Jolly , 2014Schmidt and Reschly 2000;Schmidt, Zimmerman-Umble, and Reschly 2002;Van Ness 1995) informs us that on average, the women in both communities are mothers of seven children, responsible for the home, children's education, family needs, and community support. The differences between the two groups lie primarily in education and work patterns.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“Mobile internet is worse than the internet; it can destroy our community”: Old Order Amish and Ultra-Orthodox Jewish women’s responses to cellphone and smartphone use

Shahar

2019

The Information Society

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In this article I explore use patterns and perceptions of cellphone and smartphone use among Old Order Amish and Ultra-Orthodox Jewish women with participant observations, interviews, and a survey. My findings show that although they differ in their cellphone use (the Amish mostly do not use them and the Ultra-Orthodox only use those deemed to be "kosher"), they concur in their nonuse of smartphonesthey see the smartphone as impure. Both view smartphones as undermining social relations and community by distracting users away from friends and family.

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Ohio Amish Women in the Vanguard of a Language Change: Pennsylvania German in Ohio

Cited by 12 publications

References 5 publications

Social class and gender impacting change in bilingual settings: Spanish subject pronoun use in New York

Social class and gender impacting change in bilingual settings: Spanish subject pronoun use in New York

Why Is Inflectional Morphology Difficult to Borrow?—Distributing and Lexicalizing Plural Allomorphy in Pennsylvania Dutch

“Mobile internet is worse than the internet; it can destroy our community”: Old Order Amish and Ultra-Orthodox Jewish women’s responses to cellphone and smartphone use

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