English 
Chinese 
Dutch 
Arabic 
Spanish 
Portuguese 
Russian 
French 
Italian 
German 
Japanese 
Continue reading with a subscription
Get unlimited access to all our premium content and exclusive features.
Enjoy unlimited access, cancel anytime.
Summary
- Mennonites say “once” because of German grammar, not theology. German uses mal — shortened einmal — as a softener, and “come here once” is “komm mal her” in English words.
- Pennsylvania Dutch is a German dialect, chiefly Palatine, brought to Pennsylvania from the 1680s. The structure carried across when those communities began speaking English.
- The same substrate gives “still” and “yet” from noch, “redd up”, “outen the light” and “the butter is all”.
- The label is wrong: the speech belongs to Pennsylvania Dutch speakers generally, including Lutheran and Reformed families, and most Mennonites worldwide do not speak this way.
- “Dutch” is a corruption of Deitsch, the dialect’s own name, which is the same word as German.
Bibliography (Click to show)
Sources: standard works on Pennsylvania Dutch and Pennsylvania Dutch English for the German substrate behind “once”, “still”, “redd up”, “outen” and “the butter is all”, and for “Dutch” as a rendering of Deitsch. The dialect’s Palatine German origin and immigration from the 1680s are historical record, as is Menno Simons joining the Anabaptist movement in 1536. Scripture quotations from the NIV via BibleGateway (Matthew 5:9, 34, 44).
