Hans C. Boas

Today, my wonderful academic home department of the last 25 years, the Department of Germanic Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, will cease to exist. Per orders from university leaders, it is being merged with two other units, the Department of French and Italian and the Department of Slavic Studies, into a new unit called the Department of European and Eurasian Studies. 

Today, I co-presented a talk (with Margo Blevins and Utpal Pandey) on the TGDP’s effort towards compiling a dictionary of Texas German at the Institute fuer Deutsche Sprache (Institute for the German Language) in Mannheim, Germany: Documenting word usage in a critically endangered dialect.

Today, I presented a plenary talk at the Humboldt-Kolleg Making Minorities Visible: Language as a Medium of Inclusion and Exclusion at the University of Vienna (Austria): “Zur Rekonstruktion des Texas Deutschen im 19. Jahrhundert: Was wir wissen und was wir nicht wissen (können)” (On the reconstruction of 19th century Texas German: What we know and what we can’t know). 

Today, I co-presented (with Thomas Schmidt) a talk at the University of Marburg (Germany): “Von Hessen nach Texas — Sprachvariation und Variation in sprachlichen Daten” (From Hessia to Texas – Linguistic Variation and Variation in Spoken Language Data).

Today I gave a talk at the Linguistics Colloquium at the University of Wuerzburg (Germany): Zur Entwickling des Texas-Deutschen vom 19. Jahrhundert bis heute (On the development of Texas German from the 19th century until today).