Vowel lowering, consonant cluster simplification, and koineization in the history of Pennsylvania Dutch

Abstract

Scholars who have investigated the history of Pennsylvania Dutch (Pennsylvania German) have come to the unanimous consensus that the language most closely resembles the German dialects of the Palatinate region (Pfalz). This is not surprising, since the majority of the German-speaking immigrants to colonial Pennsylvania came from that area. Aiming to identify the precise European origins of Pennsylvania Dutch, researchers found that in its core structural features and lexicon, the language is not identical to any one variety of Palatine German. Pennsylvania Dutch must therefore have been subject to mixing and leveling of input dialects and independent development during the earliest generations. In this article I situate the history of Pennsylvania Dutch in the literature on koineization and new dialect formation, focusing on the most striking structural differences between Pennsylvania Dutch and Palatine German, the lowering of high and mid vowels in closed syllables before tautosyllabic /r/ and the subsequent simplification of /r/ + C clusters through either /r/-deletion or vowel epenthesis.