Amazon.com description: Product Description: The focus of this book is on language maintenance and shift among both the sectarian and nonsectarian groups of the Pennsylvania Germans. The study of the sociolinguistic behavior of the six families studied constitutes a case study that allows the author to describe patterns characteristic of the whole Pennsylvania German speech island. At the end of the book, an attempt is made to integrate the phonological findings into a larger theory of language change and to make predictions about future linguistic developments within the various groups.