Plautdietsch in Russia

• Little consensus on the origins of these features:

• • Some suggest that a sound change took place in Prussia in the thirty years between waves of emigration, causing differences in the speech of earlier and later settlers in both colonies
  • Others have argued that these differences were already in place in Prussia, but in different regions, social classes, or denominations - and that settlers from different groups brought along different ways of speaking to their new homes in Russia
  • • No-one knows for certain: later changes in Plautdietsch make this difficult to determine, but several features appear associated with region (e.g. -eiw- is a Danzig feature, as is ekj senn ‘I am’)