Hans C. Boas

Just published! This year’s newsletter of the Texas German Dialect Project just got published. Click here for updates on all things Texas German. Happy Holidays!

I am proud to announce that the Texas German Dialect Project received a grant from the Volkswagen Foundation, 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 processing of 19th century letters written by German-American immigrants.

Together with my colleague Dr. Marc Pierce, I presented a talk on “Evaluating the (Possible) Creole Status of Texas German” at the Fourth AMC Symposium: Contact and language change at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland.

After many years of work, I’m happy to announce the availability of a new online corpus tool for exploring transcripts from the Texas German Dialect Project’s open-ended socio-linguistic interviews! The interviews can be searched in multiple ways by using the CQP query language for exploring the transcripts. This new version of our open-ended interviews is available HERE.

Together with Luke Lindemann and Matthias Warmuth, I presented a talk “On the Predictability of Koiné and New-dialect Formation: Branching Pathways of Feature Developments in Texas German” at the 52nd annual New Ways of Analyzing Variation (NWAV) conference in Miami, Florida.