Joshua Jacob Snider

Joshua Jacob Snider was born in Petoskey, Michigan in 1978. He has studied second languages intensively since the age of 14 and the Germanic languages other than English since the age of 16. He is a fairly competent reader of all 15 official modern written Germanic languages with fluency in English, German, Dutch/Flemish, and Swedish. His family is mostly Mennonite and his Grandparents' native tongue was Pennsylvania German, a Franconian (Rheinland-Pfaelz) dialect sharing many words with Yiddish, and Letzembuergesch. He grew up with his maternal half sister whose father is half Missinabie Cree First Nation and half Green River Ojibway. Joshua has studied linguistics both in the classroom and independently and has studied the Algonquian, Semitic, and Balto-Slavic language families for some time, but with more limited success than with the Germanic languages. He has created the publishing company, Mundart Press, which has also published a Meskwaki (Fox) dictionary. Mundart Press exists in order to produce language learning materials for marginalized and endangered languages. Joshua is currently working on English translations of works by the Yiddish author Itzik Kipnis and lives in Petoskey, Michigan with his wife Sarah and son Declan.