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The Texas German Dialect Project Corpus as a Diachronic Resource for Investigating Language Contact

Paper · 2026 · Thomas Schmidt, Margaret M. Blevins, Hans C. Boas et al.

Summary

Texas German formed from several immigrant dialects and is expected to lose its last speakers within the next decade. Most corpora of such heritage varieties cover only one period, so studying change over time is difficult. The authors (Texas German Dialect Project, TGDP) address this by adding a historical layer to their existing contemporary corpus. Glenn Gilbert donated his 1960s fieldwork recordings to the project in 2017. These have been turned into the GTXG corpus, which contains open-ended interviews, translation elicitation tasks and biographical interviews. The recordings are transcribed in ELAN and run through the same annotation pipeline used for the post-2001 material. The open-ended GTXG interviews are already available on the ZuMult platform, and the historical translation elicitations will follow later in 2026. Because the old and new data use closely matching elicitation methods and processing, they can be compared directly. This gives researchers a diachronic resource of more than 50 years for studying language contact, dialect contact and language death in an endangered variety.

Key points

  • The TGDP has interviewed more than 800 speakers since 2001. Its December 2025 ZuMult release holds 196 hours of audio, 1,494,400 tokens and 475 speakers.
  • Transcripts carry several annotation layers, all searchable with a CQP query tool:
    • tokenization, language tags and normalization;
    • STTS 2.0 and Universal Dependencies POS tags;
    • lemmas, canonical phonetic forms and word-by-word English glosses.
  • GTXG (Gilbert Texas German) covers 63 recording events with 98 participants, about a quarter of whom are incidental speakers. It includes 51 open-ended interviews (11 h), 49 biographical interviews (8 h) and several translation tasks.
  • The translation tasks include the Atlas list (about 230 prompts), Gilbert Long (more than 1,200 prompts, 21 h) and the Wenker sentences (about 115 prompts).
  • One speaker was recorded both by Gilbert and by the TGDP, which allows a case study of how one person's language changed over time.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓The University of Texas at AustinAustin · United States109 works · 56,942 citations

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 2The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 16,039 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 15,891 works

🧭 Topics 1Research subjects and languages the work is about.Historical linguistics & language change · 249 works

Cite

Cite as Thomas Schmidt, Margaret M. Blevins, Hans C. Boas and Glenn Gilbert. 2026. The Texas German Dialect Project Corpus as a Diachronic Resource for Investigating Language Contact. Proceedings of the First Workshop on Dialects in NLP –- A Resource Perspective.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.63317/3s622jzdgwuj

@inproceedings{schmidt2026texas,
  title = {{The Texas German Dialect Project Corpus as a Diachronic Resource for Investigating Language Contact}},
  author = {Thomas Schmidt, Margaret M. Blevins, Hans C. Boas and Glenn Gilbert},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the First Workshop on Dialects in NLP –- A Resource Perspective},
  year = {2026},
  doi = {10.63317/3s622jzdgwuj},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.63317/3s622jzdgwuj}
}

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