Members of the TGDP organize the The Texas Symposium on Classifying Contact Varieties on the UT Austin campus! Dates: January 15–16, 2026. Location: Harry Ransom Center, Tom Lea Room (HRC 3.206). Description: There is little agreement about which exact types and numbers of structural features should be used to classify a contact variety as a creole rather than another type of contact variety. If one looked at structural features alone, one could perhaps be led to argue that Texas German is creole-like because it has so many structural features in common with Unserdeutsch (Rabaul Creole German), even though the socio-historical backgrounds of the two varieties are drastically different. This symposium brings together a group of scholars to discuss how one can develop an empirical methodology for classifying contact varieties more systematically. For the full schedule and the abstracts, click HERE.
The TGDP is happy to announce the new release of the ZuMult platform, in collaboration with linguisticbits.de. Besides additional transcribed interviews from the TGDP, an additional annotation layer for Universal Dependency POS tags, and a couple of improvements to the front-end (streamlined navigation, improvements to the KWIC display and more), this new version also contains the historical interviews conducted by Glenn Gilbert in the 1960s with speakers of Texas German. This adds a diachronic dimension to the study of Texas German. The new version is at https://tgdp-zumult.la.utexas.edu/index.jsp.
Atiba Pertilla (German Historical Institute, Washington, D.C.) visits the TGDP to discuss progress on the research project sponsored by the Volkswagen Foundation and to present a talk on “Exploring the Migrant Connections Corpus” (Jan. 21, 2026).
TGDP presentation by Jim Kearney:January 12, 2026, Colorado County Historical Association, “How small town Columbus built its Archives and Texas Room into one of the finest in the State.”