Concept

Russian Mennonites

Résumé
The Russian Mennonites (Russlandmennoniten [lit. "Russia Mennonites", i.e., Mennonites of or from the Russian Empire], occasionally Ukrainian Mennonites) are a group of Mennonites who are the descendants of Dutch Anabaptists who settled in the Vistula delta in West Prussia for about 250 years and established colonies in the Russian Empire (present-day Ukraine and Russia's Volga region, Orenburg Governorate, and Western Siberia) beginning in 1789. Since the late 19th century, many of them have emigrated to countries which are located throughout the Western Hemisphere. The rest of them were forcibly relocated, so very few of their descendants currently live in the locations of the original colonies. Russian Mennonites are traditionally multilingual but Plautdietsch (Mennonite Low German) is their first language as well as their lingua franca. In 2014, there were several hundred thousand Russian Mennonites: about 200,000 live in Germany, 74,122 live in Mexico, 70,000 in Bolivia, 40,000 live in Paraguay, 10,000 live in Belize, tens of thousands of them live in Canada and the US, and a few thousand live in Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil. The term "Russian Mennonite" refers to the country which they resided in before their immigration to the Americas rather than their ethnic heritage. The term "Low-German Mennonites" is also used in order to avoid this conflation. Vistula delta Mennonites In the early-to-mid 16th century, Mennonites began to flee to the Vistula Delta region in the Kingdom of Poland in order to avoid persecution in the Low Countries—especially Friesland and Flanders—seeking religious freedom and exemption from military service. They gradually replaced their Dutch and Frisian languages with the Low German language spoken in the area, blending into it elements of their native tongues to create a distinct dialect known as Plautdietsch. Today Plautdietsch is the distinct Mennonite language that developed over a period of 300 years in the Vistula delta region and south Russia.
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