TGDP presentation at the Conference Varieties in Contact: Phenomena – Methods – Theories: “TGDA 2.0 – An enriched Texas German Dialect Corpus for (comparative) corpus analyses” (Hans C. Boas, Margo Blevins, Thomas Schmidt). University of Dortmund, Germany (June 6, 2025).

Official start of the 18-month long research project “Let the People of the Past Speak! Turning Migrant Letters from the 19th Century into Speech”, funded by the Volkswagen Foundation. Together with Atiba Pertilla from the German Historical Institute in Washington D.C. and Thomas Schmidt from Linguisticbits (Germany), members of the TGDP will be exploring how 19th century handwritten Texas German letters can be turned into spoken Texas German with the help of artificial intelligence.

TGDP presentation at the Workshop “Archiving Ethnic Voices and Memory: A Roundtable on German Americana” at the 71st Annual Conference of the German Association for American Studies in Siegen, Germany. Organized by Jana Weiss (UT Austin), with participation of Hans C. Boas on the founding, evolution, and relevance of the Texas German Dialect Archive for (German) American Studies.

Story on the history of Texas German appears in the German news magazine “Der Spiegel” online: “Mit ‘Howdy’ gruessen, Brahms singen.”

TGDP presentation at the Division on Alsatian Dialectology, University of Strasbourg (France): “250 Years of Texas German.” (Hans C. Boas) (June 17, 2024).

Student Project on Texas Germans! Dr. Jana Weiss and her TA Anthony Hernandez Escobar took their students on a field trip to the Oakwood Cemetery as part of the UGS course “The Texas German Experience” (Fall 2024). The students examined the lives and contributions of notable Texas Germans buried at the Austin cemetery. Check out the student projects here: https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/9eecdd9031e44f3e8babc83732d8a738

TGDP presentation at the University of Klagenfurt (Austria): “Documenting and Analyzing Texas German.” (Hans C. Boas, June 24, 2025).

Dr. Thomas Schmidt visits the TGDP to continue programming work on the Texas German Dialect Archive.

TGDP presentation at the 49th annual Symposium of the Society for German American Studies (Milwaukee, Wisconsin): “The study of Texas German in the 1960s.” (Hans C. Boas, Marc Pierce, and Joren Somers).

TGDP presentation at the 49th annual Symposium of the Society for German American Studies (Milwaukee, Wisconsin): “Updating the Texas German Dialect Corpus for (Comparative) Speech Island Analysis.” (Hans C. Boas, Thomas Schmidt, and Margo Blevins).

A new student research assistant joined the TGDP: Welcome, Blayne Burke!

And Marisol Bayona Roman has joined the TGDP again — welcome back, Marisol!

Texas German is featured in Die Tageszeitung (Berlin, Germany): High Noon für Texasdeutsch [LINK]

Dr. Laura Guse (Goethe-Universitaet Frankfurt) visits the TGDP for 3 weeks to conduct research on motion constructions in Texas German.

TGDP presentation at SALSA XXIX (the 29th. Symposium About Language and Society Austin): “Documenting word usage in a critically endangered dialect: The Texas German Lexicographic Database.” (Hans C. Boas, Margo Blevins, Utpal Pandey, Joren Somers) (January 17, 2025)

New student research assistants are joining the TGDP: Elisabeth Berman, Kaplan Brady, Damian del Bosque, and Allison Frank. Welcome to the TGDP team!

The Texas Monthly – The National Magazine of Texas interviewed Hans C. Boas for an article on the meaning of the German word “Bock” as it is used in the famous name Shiner Bock beer. [LINK]

After years of work, the Texas German Dialect Project is proud to announce a new tool for exploring transcripts from TGDP open-ended socio-linguistic interviews! Transcripts have been enriched with several new annotation layers (e.g., language, orthographic normalization, part-of-speech, and lemma) and basic speaker metadata is now available. The open-ended interviews can be searched in multiple ways, e.g., using filters (e.g., by speaker, interview location, interview date) and by using the CQP query language for exploring the transcripts themselves. This new version of our open-ended interviews is available HERE or by going to the “Dialect Archive” menu.

TGDP presentation at the Fourth AMC Symposium: Contact and language change at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland: “Evaluating the (Possible) Creole Status of Texas German” (Marc Pierce and Hans C. Boas).

The TGDP is proud to announce that it received a grant from the Volkswagen Foundation in Germany, together with the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C. The 18-month long collaborative research project “Let the People of the Past Speak! Turning Migrant Letters of the 19th Century into Speech” will apply artificial intelligence to the transcription of 19th century letters written by German-American immigrants, then turning the letters into historically reconstructed spoken German.

TGDP presentation at the 52nd annual New Ways of Analyzing Variation (NWAV) conference in Miami, Florida: “On the predictability of Koiné and New-dialect Formation: Branching Pathways of Feature Developments in Texas German.” (Luke Lindemann, Matthias Warmuth, Hans C. Boas).

Prof. Dr. Csaba Foeldes (University of Erfurt, Germany) visits the TGDP and presents a talk on “Wem gehört die Interkulturalität? Über das Verhältnis von linguistischen Teildisziplinen und Kulturforschung” (‘Who owns interculturality? On the relationship between lingusitic sub-disciplines and cultural studies.”

TGDP presentation by Margo Blevins at the New Braunfels German American Society: “The Texas German Dialect Project: Preserving Texas German Voices for Future Generations.” (October 1, 2024)

German author Thomas Meinecke, who donated his recordings of interviews with Texas Germans from the 1990s to the TGDP last year, publishes his latest novel Odenwald, with Suhrkamp publishing house in Germany. The novel’s story line includes the Texas German dialect as well as TGDP members Hans Boas, Glenn Gilbert, and Jim Kearney. (October 14, 2024)

New student research assistants are joining the TGDP: Tanja Haupt, Leon Nast, Kathrin Norman, Anna Reschke, Moritz Schanbacher, and Julia Schauer. Welcome to the TGDP team!

TGDP presentation by Hans C. Boas at the Boerne public library: “Preserving Texas German Voices for Future Generations.” (September 18, 2024)

Dr. Joren Somers, a postdoctoral researcher from the University of Gent in Belgium, is at UT Austin for the academic year 2024-25 and is joining the TGDP to conduct research, among other things, about language contact. Welcome Joren!

TGDP member Ekaterina Levina graduates with her Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin, with a dissertation on “Accusative external possessives in German, English, Spanish, and Russian.” Congratulations Katja !!!

This fall 2024 semester, TGDP member Jana Weiss offers a class on Texas German history and culture at UT Austin (UGS 302, The Texas-German Experience).