The Emergence of Mennonite Low German

Mennonite Plautdietsch is thus from its beginning of mixed linguistic character - at its core Low German, but with striking influence from Dutch (and, more rarely, Frisian) in its vocabulary
- These distinctive features have been well preserved to the present day - when Dutch researchers began working to document Mennonite Plautdietsch in Siberia in the 1990s, several newspapers in the Netherlands reported: “In Siberia, they’re speaking our dialects!”

Cf. Epp (1993).

Mennonite Plautdietsch is thus from its beginning of mixed linguistic character - at its core Low German, but with striking influence from Dutch (and, more rarely, Frisian) in its vocabulary