Outen the Lights: A Visitor Glossary to Pennsylvania Dutch Words and Sayings

Spend a weekend in Lancaster County and you will hear English that is not quite the English you brought with you. Someone will ask you to outen the lights. A market vendor will tell you the shoofly pie is all. A grandmother will tell a child to redd up the table. None of this is broken English — it is the fingerprint of a German dialect that has been spoken on this farmland for three hundred years, pressing on the local English like a thumb in clay.

Here is what you are actually hearing, and why.

First: Two Different Things

People blur these constantly, so it is worth separating them up front:

• Pennsylvania Dutch (Deitsch) is a real language — a German dialect descended from the Palatinate German of settlers who arrived in the 1700s. It is still spoken daily at home by Amish and Old Order Mennonite families across the county. Not Dutch, not from Holland: Dutch here is a worn-down rendering of Deutsch, meaning German. (More on that history in our Pennsylvania Dutch vs Amish explainer.)
• Dutchified English is what happens when the grammar of that German dialect leaks into English. It is spoken far beyond the Plain communities — you will hear it from lifelong non-Amish Lancastrians, including people whose families dropped the dialect generations ago.

Visitors mostly encounter the second. The phrases below are the second.

The Greatest Hits

• Outen the lights — turn off the lights. A direct calque of the German construction mach's Licht aus, literally "make the light out." The verb outen exists only because German built it first.
• Redd up — tidy up, clear away. "Redd up your room before your grandparents get here." This one arrived by a different road: it traces to a Middle English and Scots verb meaning to clear or put in order, and settled comfortably into the regional vocabulary.
• The butter is all — the butter is finished, we are out of it. All as a standalone adjective meaning "all gone" is pure German alle. You will hear this at a market stall the moment the whoopie pies run out.
• Make the door shut — close the door. German uses machen (to make) where English uses "do" or nothing at all.
• It is making down / spritzing — it is raining / it is drizzling lightly.
• Rutsching — squirming, sliding around in a seat. Every Pennsylvania Dutch child has been told to stop rutsching in church.
• Schnickelfritz — an affectionate word for a mischievous, high-energy child.
• Doplich — clumsy.
• Wonderful good — very good. German wunderbar pressed into service as an intensifier.

The Famous Word-Order Joke

The classic sentence — and every local has heard the joke — is some version of "Throw the horse over the fence some hay." Visitors hear a horse being launched over a fence. What is actually happening is German sentence structure, where the object can land in a spot English speakers do not expect. The same shape shows up in gentler everyday forms: "throw me down the stairs my shoes," "the pie is all," "are you going along?" (from mitgehen, to go with).

It is grammar with a different skeleton, wearing English clothes.

Actual Deitsch to Listen For

If you spend time at Central Market, the Friday Green Dragon, or a spring mud sale auction, you will hear the actual language between vendors, families, and auctioneers switching mid-sentence. A few phrases you may catch (spellings vary — it is primarily a spoken language, and orthography was never standardized):

• Wie bischt? — how are you?
• Guder Mariye — good morning
• Denki — thank you
• Gern gschehne — you are welcome
• Kumm esse — come eat

A gentle caution: this is a home language, not a tourist phrasebook. Greeting an Amish shopkeeper in careful Deitsch reads as performance rather than courtesy. Listening is the respectful posture — the same principle as the photography rule.

Who Actually Speaks It

Here is the fact that surprises linguists least and visitors most: Pennsylvania Dutch is not dying. Among the wider "Fancy Dutch" population — the Lutheran and Reformed descendants of the same German settlers — the dialect has largely faded within a few generations. But among the Amish and Old Order Mennonites it remains the everyday household language, and because those communities are growing quickly, the total number of speakers is rising. Amish children typically grow up speaking Deitsch at home, learn English when they start school at age six, and read a formal German for scripture — three languages, one of the practical reasons the one-room schoolhouse is busier than it looks.

Where the Words Show Up on a Menu

Much of the county food vocabulary is dialect that never bothered translating:

• Shoofly pie — molasses crumb pie (our pie guide settles the wet-bottom question)
• Chow chow — sweet-and-sour pickled vegetable relish
• Schnitz un knepp — dried apples and dumplings, usually with ham
• Fastnacht — the fried doughnut eaten on Shrove Tuesday
• Scrapple — the famously unglamorous, famously good breakfast loaf
• Bot boi — what a menu writes as chicken pot pie, and what arrives as a stew with square hand-rolled noodles rather than anything with a crust

The full eating vocabulary lives in our Lancaster food guide.

Hear It in Context

The best way to hear the language doing real work is to be somewhere it is being used unselfconsciously — a farm visit, a market morning, a family table. The small-group tours put you in exactly those rooms, with guides who can explain what you are hearing:

And the most immersive version remains a home-cooked meal at an Amish family table, where the switch between Deitsch and English happens naturally over the food (how that works):

The rest of the explainer series: electricity, taxes, schools, rumspringa, weddings, and Amish vs Mennonite.