What is Plautdietsch?

The closest count of living languages today across the globe is 7,358. Various languages with less than 100,000 speakers account for 90% of the world's languages, while less than 2,000 languages are spoken by 1,000 people, more or less. It is fascinating to know that more than a million people only speak 150 to 200 languages while 46 languages could each have only one speaker.

Plautdietsch is an exclusive language spoken by a select few. Plautdietsch, a variety of East Low German, is a Mennonite language. It is the exclusive language of the Mennonites, a religious group originally from Belgium and Holland. They fled these two countries in the 16th century to avoid persecution. Eventually they settled in Canada, the United States and in some Latin American countries.

Today, 80,000 Mennonites living in Canada and those who have settled in Belize, Bolivia, Brazil, Costa Rica, Germany, Kazakhstan, Mexico and Paraguay speak Plautdietsch. In the United States, they are mainly in the city of Hillsboro in Kansas, in Reedley, California and the town of Corn in Oklahoma. Overall, about 300,000 Mennonites speak the language.