Department of German, Nordic, & Slavic
Biography
Mark L. Louden is the Alfred L. Shoemaker, J. William Frey, and Don Yoder Professor of Germanic Linguistics and director of the Max Kade Institute for German-American Studies. He received his A.B., M.A., and Ph.D. in Germanic linguistics from Cornell University. Most of his published research and public outreach center on Pennsylvania Dutch, varieties of German spoken in Europe and North America, and Yiddish. The linguistic subfields covered in his publications and courses include syntax, language contact, dialectology, and sociolinguistics. Apart from his teaching and research, he serves as an interpreter and cultural mediator for Amish and Old Order Mennonite groups in the legal and health care systems.
Teaching
German 351: Intro to German Linguistics
German 352: Topics in German Linguistics
– German-English Contact
– The German Language in America
Website
Selected Publications
Pennsylvania Dutch: The Story of an American Language
Louden, M. Pennsylvania Dutch: The Story of an American Language.
While most world languages spoken by minority populations are in serious danger of becoming extinct, Pennsylvania Dutch is thriving. In fact, the number of Pennsylvania Dutch speakers is growing exponentially, although it is spoken by less than one-tenth of one percent of the United States population and has remained for the most part an oral vernacular without official recognition or support. A true sociolinguistic wonder, Pennsylvania Dutch has been spoken continuously since the late eighteenth century, even though it has never been “refreshed” by later waves of immigration from abroad. In this probing study, Mark L. Louden, himself a fluent speaker of Pennsylvania Dutch, provides readers with a close look at the place of the language in the life and culture of two major subgroups of speakers: the “Fancy Dutch,” whose ancestors were affiliated mainly with Lutheran and German Reformed churches, and conservative Anabaptist sectarians known as the “Plain people”―the Old Order Amish and Mennonites. Drawing on scholarly literature, three decades of fieldwork, and ample historical documents―most of which have never before been made accessible to English-speaking readers―this is the first book to offer a comprehensive look at this unlikely linguistic success story.
A Word Atlas of Pennsylvania German
Seifert, L. W. J., M. Louden (Co-editor), J. Salmons (Co-editor), and H. Martin (Co-editor). A Word Atlas of Pennsylvania German.
This is the most extensive reference work documenting linguistic variations in Pennsylvania German (also known as Pennsylvania Dutch), the dialect now spoken primarily by Old Order Amish and Old Order Mennonite communities in the United States. This Word Atlas displays more than 170 maps showing regional variants for a word or grammatical form throughout the former German-speaking regions of southeastern Pennsylvania, as well as helpful maps of Pennsylvanian geographical features and political boundaries. One of the pioneers in linguistic research on this dialect, Lester W. J. Seifert of the University of Wisconsin–Madison and his colleague Carroll Reed of the University of Washington interviewed almost 100 speakers in these regions during the 1940s, using an extensive questionnaire. This research, graphically represented in the Word Atlas, is an invaluable record of a historically and culturally important language that is rapidly dying out. The volume also reprints four of Seifert’s classic essays on the dialect geography of Pennsylvania German, as well as biographies of the linguistic consultants, an original essay on the development of Pennsylvania German dialectology and linguistics by Mark Louden, and a new biography of Seifert by Howard Martin and Suzanne Treichel.