Russian Mennonite

Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. The Russian Mennonites are a group of Mennonites descended from Dutch and mainly Germanic Prussian Anabaptists who established colonies in South Russia (present-day Ukraine) beginning in 1789. Since the late 1800s, many of them have come to countries throughout the Western Hemisphere. The rest were forcibly relocated, so that few of their descendants now live at the location of the original colonies. Russian Mennonites are traditionally multilingual with Plautdietsch (Mennonite Low German) as their lingua franca. In the early-to-mid 1500s, Mennonites began to move from the Low Countries (especially Friesland) and Flanders to the Vistula delta region, seeking religious freedom and exemption from military service. They gradually replaced their Dutch and Frisian languages with the Plautdietsch dialect spoken in the area, blending into it elements of their native tongues. Plautdietsch is the distinct Mennonite language which developed over a period of 300 years in the Vistula delta region and south Russia.