Plautdietsch is a Low German variety that grew in the Vistula delta of what was then Royal Prussia, where Mennonite families from the Netherlands and Friesland settled from the 1530s onwards. It carries a Dutch and Frisian substrate under a Low Prussian frame — which is why a Dutch speaker catches words that a High German speaker misses.
When families moved to the steppe of the Russian Empire from 1789, the language moved with them and kept going: to Canada in the 1870s, Mexico and Paraguay in the 1920s, Bolivia and Belize after the Second World War, Germany with the Aussiedler of the 1970s to 1990s. Today it is spoken on five continents, by several hundred thousand people.
Two main varieties
Speakers usually distinguish a Chortitza (Old Colony) and a Molotschna variety. The differences are small — vowels, a handful of words — and everybody understands everybody.
No standard spelling
Plautdietsch has been mostly a spoken language, and several writing systems exist side by side: some follow German conventions, some English, some their own. On this site we accept every spelling. Write the way you speak — we do not correct, and we never machine-translate Plautdietsch into another language.