Word History: In the late 17th and early 18th centuries, groups of immigrants from southwestern Germany, Alsace, and Switzerland settled in Pennsylvania. The groups spoke closely related dialects of German that eventually merged into a new, distinctly American variety of German that came to be known as Pennsylvania Dutch. (The word Dutch in this expression comes from Deitsch, the Pennsylvania German equivalent of Deutsch, the standard German word for “German.” The spelling of the word as Dutch has undoubtedly been influenced by the English word Dutch. English Dutch comes from the Middle Dutch word Dūtsch, meaning “Dutch” or “German,” that is the Dutch equivalent of the German word Deutsch.) Pennsylvania Dutch, which is still spoken in some communities in Pennsylvania today—notably by the Amish—has contributed a number of words to American English, including dunk, hex, smearcase, snollygoster, spritz, and perhaps snickerdoodle. The dialect has also left other traces in the grammar and usage of English in Pennsylvania. For instance, in German, the word alle, literally meaning “all,” can be used idiomatically to mean “all gone, used up, at an end.” The standard German sentence Der Kaffee ist alle (word for word, “The coffee is all”) means “The coffee is all gone” or “The coffee has been used up,” for example. Some Pennsylvanians, too, may say The coffee is all to mean “The coffee is all gone”—the use of the English word all to mean “all gone” reflects the influence of Pennsylvania Dutch and reminds us of the days when many Pennsylvanians were bilingual in English and Pennsylvania Dutch and would switch back and forth between them in their daily lives.