It's funny how different cultures and congregations differ from each other. Where I grew up - in Oregon, in a small church - as soon as an English-speaking person came along we switched to English. Had we known the word 'gauche' that is what we would have thought it to not include them in the conversation.

Then when I was almost 14 my family moved to Virginia to a large Amish church. And there the 'jungen' spoke 'deutsch' as soon as English speakers appeared. (Strangely enough, a great many of the younger generation spoke English even at home to their parents; the parents spoke deutsch, they were answered in English. When my best friend eventually married and had 5 children they never taught deutsch to their kids. This friend and her husband left the Amish and went to a Conservative Mennonite church.)

Ron, your quote, as written, would literally be: "You, Mommmy. He has 20 of them." More likely she would have said the equivalent of 'See' or 'Look', Mommy. I can't find the German form of Look; we used so many idioms and colloquialisms that the 'hoch deutsch' sometimes gets lost. But the words we used was 'guk' (sp?), pronounced like 'look'.

At home we spoke the dialect- not Platt Deutsch. Platt is a separate dialect as is 'Schweitzer Deutsch'. My mother's family emigrated from the Alsace in the 1700s; my father's family from south Germany somewhat later.

One thing the Amish do is keep good records. My father's family is traced back to the 14th century when it was spelled differently but still recognizably. Many books have been written with the material taken from the records of the 'old countries'. Most Amish - ex or not - have these books and I'm no exception.

My family spoke our German dialect at home until we started caring for foster children (of whom my parents adopted two); after that we all spoke English at all times. (And no, I didn't teach German to my daughter.)

We spoke the dialect but read the High German. Nowadays, because the dialect is an unwritten language, speaking High German is easier.