June 6, 2007
Zentrales Texas hat es soll Sprache besitzen
In 2001, Californian Hans Boas set out on a road trip to Austin to teach German classes at The University of Texas when he stopped by Fredericksburg, the modest Hill Country town known for its good food, great shopping, and strong German heritage.
Over lunch, he overheard a conversation spoken in an "interesting sounding German," a dialect that incorporated English words and English phrases, but was pronounced in a distinctly German accent.
Investing further, he discovered these Fredericksburgers were speaking Texas German, a language created by German immigrants settling in the Texas Hill Country during the 1830s. The language is unique to the area, with over 200 native speakers, but it is a language of antiquity, and, as most fluent speakers die, Texas German disappears with them. By 2040, Texas German will become extinct.
Today, Boas and a group of others have created The Texas German Dialect Project (TGDP), an organization devoted to the documentation and preservation of this Central Texas language. With financial assistance from the Dean of Liberal Arts at UT, the members of TGDP are hard at work recording, archiving, and analyzing the language by interviewing hundreds of speakers. Their website includes dozens of links on the origin of the language, German heritage in Texas, as well as an expansive archive free of charge.
Click here to listen to a conversation with a native Texas German speaker.
Photo of courtesy of Olivander.
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Interesting story. There are numerous examples of Old World Languages evolving in the United States. Amish “Dutch” is another German variant. Cajun French was at risk of dying out in the 1960s but is now in revival. The Gullah dialect in the Coastal Sea Islands of Georgia and South Carolina was an amalgamation of West African languages and English. I would not be surprised if New York Yiddish of the 1930s had evolved to be a separate dialect from the Polish Yiddish of the same time.
True.
Another example is American Sign Language. It's a mix of French Sign Language and various North American pidgin sign developed by deaf children in the American northeast.
Interestingly enough, back when ASL was being developed, one British family held a monopoly over deaf education and when American educators wanted help, they refused in fear of competition. So, they turned to the French.
I remember learning about this 30 years ago in my HS German class in SA (not too surprisingly). I was told that it was called 'TexDertch'. I guess a parallel to TexMex.