In print, the name looks as if it should rhyme with toes, but if you are familiar with the way English is spoken by prairie Mennonites, you know that they flatten the pesky German umlaut. “Toews Rhymes with Raves” was one helpful recent headline. In Low German, we go with the swing of the umlaut and opt for Tifes—to rhyme with lifes.
We? They? You guessed it. I know all this because I’m one of them. The “whimsical language of our people” mentioned frequently in Miriam Toews’s new novel is my own mother tongue. Whimsical is not the word I would have used when I was the age of Nomi Nickel, the 16-year-old narrator of A Complicated Kindness. Low German was just the language we used for the nitty-gritty of daily life on the farm—the language spoken (never written) to cows and to babies.
Like most Mennonites of her generation, Nomi appears to be monolingual. Going, going, gone is the rich world of Low German culture. Her parents bring to the language a...
Magdalene Redekop is a professor emerita in the Department of English at the University of Toronto and the author of numerous articles on Mennonite culture. She is writing a book entitled Making Believe: Mennonites and the Crisis of Representation.
Advertisement
Advertisement