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. It will then train artificial intelligence on historical recordings of German dialects from the 1930s and it will apply the resulting language model to train a text-to-speech synthesizer that will read these letters, thereby reconstructing spoken German-American dialects from the 19th century, including Texas German.