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The German Program at the University of Wisconsin  Oshkosh, in collaboration with the Departments of English and Geography and Urban Planning, will host the multimedia presentation “The Amish of Wisconsin: A New Wave of Immigrants to the Badger State” at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, March 4 in Sage Hall, room 1234.

The free program, offered by the Max Kade Institute (MKI) for German-American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is free and open to the public. It will focus on Amish culture and language and feature a discussion of immigration and heritage in the context of global migration past and present.

Wisconsin has the fourth largest Amish population in the United States. The program will focus on “the Amish and their close spiritual cousins, the Old Order Mennonites, who make up a sizable percentage of the population and have a significant impact on the local economy and the communities around them. More than 300,000 people are speakers of Pennsylvania Dutch in the United States and Canada, a number that is doubling every twenty years because of the group’s high birth rate.”

The March 4 program will led by Mark Louden, co-director of the Max Kade Institute and Professor of German Linguistics at UW-Madison. Professor Louden is a fluent speaker of Pennsylvania Dutch and an expert on Amish faith and culture. He is also the founder of the MKI’s newly established Pennsylvania Dutch Documentation Project, which aims to document the past and present of this growing language for the benefit of both scholars and the general public. The presentations are based on research conducted as part of the MKI’s Pennsylvania Dutch Documentation Project and will showcase materials from the MKI archives.

The program is made possible thanks to a University of Wisconsin–Madison Statewide Outreach Incentive Grant.

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