Speaker: Nora Vosburg, PhD

Presentation at 11:00 a.m: Low German, High German, and the shift towards English: Kansas Mennonites and what they can tell us about a changing culture

Over 50 million people in the United States claim German ancestry, and more than 850,000 speak some form of German at home. Yet “German” in the US includes a wide range of varieties shaped by unique community histories. This presentation explores a multilingual Mennonite community in Kansas that traditionally used three languages: Plautdietsch (a Low German variety), High German, and English. As social and religious values shift, this triglossic system is gradually giving way to English in most areas of life. Focusing on this transition, the presentation examines how language practices change during periods of community transformation and what happens to a heritage language when the majority language becomes dominant.

Speaker Bio

After completion of her PhD in German Applied Linguistics and Language Science at Penn State in 2020, Nora Vosburg has been working as a Visiting Assistant Professor at St. Olaf College, MN, where she’s been teaching across the curriculum in German and the general curriculum. Her research interests include cross-linguistic influence phenomena, language shift and maintenance, and the sociology of language and religion. She has worked on structural phenomena in language-contact situations and sociolinguistic developments like the relationship between language and faith in Mennonite immigrant communities in Kansas.

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