Hans C. Boas

I’m happy to announce the new release of the ZuMult platform for the Texas German Dialect Project, 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.

Together with my colleagues Lars Hinrichs and Marc Pierce I am organizing 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). For the full schedule and the abstracts, click HERE. 

I am excited to close out the year 2025 with two new publications !!! (1) Towards a systematic methodology for comparing extraterritorial German contact varieties. In R. Szczepaniak, S. Lindenfelser & A. Prediger (eds.), Deutsch als Minderheitensprache in der Welt, 9-49. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, and (2) Semantic frames as an empirical metalanguage for linguistic analysis. In W. Blanck, R.H. Gouws & A. Lobenstein-Reichmann (eds.), Lexikographisch-grammatische Perspektiven. Tradition, Veraenderung und Vielfalt in Lexikographie und Woerterbuchforschung. Stefan Schierholz zum 70. Geburtstag, 35-67. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter. 

New TGDP Newsletter just published. Today, the Texas German Dialect Project published its annual newsletter, click here for the electronic version.

Today, I gave a talk at the University of Erfurt (Germany) on our AI-experiments to reconstruct 19th century spoken Texas German based on handwritten letters from that time period.