Abstract As sacred spaces in human consciousness, cemeteries preserve and communicate individual and collective histories that are reflective of the societies and cultures in which we find ourselves. Cemeteries document, memorialize, and provide space for members of a society and culture in virtual perpetuity. As a result, a cemetery’s gravestones constitute an integral part of a society’s language ecology, both as a display of language within its public landscape, and as part of an ongoing conversation between the living and the dead, the past and the present. This manuscript analyzes gravestones among the Pennsylvania Dutch, a heritage language community that has existed in North America since its early colonial period. Their gravestones, as artifacts of their material culture, reveal not only the normativity of multilingualism in early American immigrant communities, but also the changes to that multilingualism resulting from ideologies about monolingualism. Concurrent with the changes in the linguistic repertoire on gravestones were changes to their visual and epitaphic aspects. As a result, this study calls for a more nuanced investigation of the interaction between material culture and multilingualism to understand more about historical language ecologies of heritage language communities.
Joshua Brown (Sat,) studied this question.