Lexical developments in Texas German

Hans C. Boas | University of Texas at Austin

Marc Pierce | University of Texas at Austin

This paper offers new insights into on-going research on lexical borrowing in language contact situations by presenting a typology of lexical borrowings in Texas German (TxG), a critically endangered dialect that will go extinct within the next 30 years. We show that the lexicon of TxG has not undergone any dramatic changes over the past four decades and that the dialectal origins of words that were still apparent when Gilbert collected his data in the 1960s can still be found today. We also argue that TxG should be classified as "stage 2" in Thomason and Kaufman's (1988) 5-stage borrowing scale ("slightly more intense contact"), which is characterized by lexical borrowing and slight structural borrowing in combination with conjunctions and adverbial particles.

Published online: 31 January 2011
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.123.06bao

Cited by

Cited by 6 other publications

Blevins, Margaret

2018. In Constructions in Contact [Constructional Approaches to Language, 24], ► pp. 73 ff.

Boas, Hans C.

2018. In Constructions in Contact [Constructional Approaches to Language, 24], ► pp. 253 ff.

Boas, Hans C. & Steffen Höder

2018. In Constructions in Contact [Constructional Approaches to Language, 24], ► pp. 5 ff.

Dux, Ryan

2017. Classifying Language Contact Phenomena: English Verbs in Texas German. Journal of Germanic Linguistics 29:4 ► pp. 379 ff.

Dux, Ryan

2018. In Constructions in Contact [Constructional Approaches to Language, 24], ► pp. 211 ff.

Pierce, Marc, Hans C. Boas & Karen A. Roesch

2015. In Germanic Heritage Languages in North America [Studies in Language Variation, 18], ► pp. 117 ff.

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