Josh Brown
UW-Eau Claire
Postvernacular Pennsylvania Dutch
Online
As language shift progresses, a heritage language can change its functional orientation from communicative to symbolic. This stage in the life of a language is termed the postvernacular. This presentation explores how Pennsylvania Dutch is used among non-sectarians in the last decades of the twentieth century and first decades of the twenty-first century in southeastern Pennsylvania. I will share how the heritage language is used in spoken, discursive, visual, and performative venues. The data show how the heritage language remains an important part of the community’s identity, although it has lost most of its communicative functions.