Publications
Publication details [#56000]
Roesch, Karen A. 2012. Language Maintenance and Language Death. The decline of Texas Alsatian. John Benjamins. xv+253 pp.
Publication type
Book – monograph
Publication language
English
Keywords
Language as a subject
Annotation
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.