Language Maintenance and Language Death
The decline of Texas Alsatian
| University of Texas at Austin
This book provides the first extensive description of Texas Alsatian, a critically-endangered Texas German dialect, as spoken in Medina County in the 21st century. The dialect was brought to Texas in the 1840s by colonists recruited by French entrepreneur Henri Castro and has been preserved with minimal change for six generations. Texas Alsatian has maintained lexical, phonological, and morphosyntactic features which differentiate it from the prevalent standard-near varieties of Texas German. This study both describes its grammatical features and discusses extra-linguistic factors contributing to the dialect’s preservation or accelerating its decline, e.g., social, historical, political, and economic factors, and speaker attitudes and ideologies linked to cultural identity. The work’s multi-faceted approach makes its relevant to a broad range of scholars such as dialectologists, historical linguists, sociolinguists, ethnographers, and anthropologists interested in language variation and change, language and identity, immigrant dialects, and language maintenance and death.
[Culture and Language Use, 6] 2012. xv, 253 pp.
Publishing status: Available
© John Benjamins Publishing Company
Table of Contents
List of tables
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xi–xii
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List of figures
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xiii–xiv
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List of illustrations
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xv–xvi
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Chapter One. Introduction
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1–34
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Chapter Two. The sociohistorical context
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35–68
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Chapter Three. The lexicon of Texas Alsatian
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69–92
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Chapter Four. The phonology of Texas Alsatian
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93–122
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Chapter Five. The morphosyntax of Texas Alsatian
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123–168
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Chapter Six. Language attitudes
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169–188
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Chapter Seven. Language maintenance and death
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189–204
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Appendices
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205–236
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References
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237–248
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Index
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249–254
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“
Language Maintenance and Language Death represents the culmination of Roesch’s vital work to document a moribund language. This book is essential reading for every student or scholar of German varieties in the United States, and it will have a place on the bookshelf of scholars with
more general interests in German and American sociolinguistics.”
more general interests in German and American sociolinguistics.”
Christopher Sapp, University of Mississippi, in American Speech 88(2): 219-222, 2013
Cited by
Cited by 7 other publications
Boas, Hans C.
Bousquette, Joshua & Michael T. Putnam
Lindemann, Luke
Markert, Patricia G.
Pierce, Marc, Hans C. Boas & Karen A. Roesch
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 07 february 2021. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.
Subjects
Linguistics
BIC Subject: CF/2AC – Linguistics/Germanic & Scandinavian languages
BISAC Subject: LAN009000 – LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES / Linguistics / General