Review of "The Life and Death of Texas German" by Hans C. Boas

When I was asked to review this book on my blog, I was unsure what I would find. Far from an expert on Texas German, I had in fact never heard of Texas German before received it in the mail this summer. However, as I've been slowly reading through it for the past few months, I've come to learn a great deal about Texas German and the rise and fall of this dialect. Overall, Boas' book is well-organized and extensively researched. His writing conveys a profound familiarity not only with the literature on Texas German, citing probably every major study undertaken of the dialecct, but also a keen interest in the process of language death, and the possibilities of language maintenance and revitalization. The only criticism I can offer is the rather clinical attitude he attempts to adopt in light of the death of Texas German, an attitude he clearly does not espouse, as evidenced by occasional glimpses of the author's true passion for the language and its continued survival. I found "The Life and Death of Texas German" to be an interesting work on three levels: (i) the analysis of Texas German as a language/dialect in its own right, (ii) the similarities of Texas German to many indigenous languages of North America in its current decline, and (iii) the origins and persistence of distinct American dialects of German, which is my own heritage language through my mother's bloodline.

The book is perhaps most obviously a useful resource for any researcher working on Texas German, or more generally on American dialects of German. More useful still is the Texas German Dialect Project, of which this publication is a product. The TGDP is a project undertaken by Boas with the help of a few research assistants to document Texas German before it becomes extinct. It has as one of its more important products the Texas German Dialect Archive. For his research, Boas developed several questionnaires ranging from translation tasks of words and sentences from English to questions about the informant's attitudes toward Texas German. (I should note here that Boas' use of the word "informant" is dated from my own Americanist perspective; generally we prefer to use the term "consultant".) Boas first gives sociohistorical context for the formation of the Texas German dialect, giving an overview of German immigration to Texas and the settlement patterns of the German settlers in central Texas, specifically around New Braunsfels, where Boas did his fieldwork for the TGDP. He then comments on new-dialect formation in Texas German, especially as regards Trudgill's (2004) model of new-dialect formation. Latter chapters give examples of specific developments in Texas German phonology and morphosyntax. Throughout, Boas argues that Texas German never underwent the final "focusing" stage of Trudgill's model, in which a dialect settles on a consistent pattern of phenomena (which is distinct from early stages which display significant interspeaker variability). In his final chapter, Boas comments on the impending death of Texas German and the possibility of language maintenance.

The parallels between the moribund Texas German dialect and the many languages of North America undergoing language death are striking. While the impact of the death of a dialect of a major language like German may not be as severe as the death of a unique language such as, e.g., Cayuse, the processes that languages undergo as they fall into disuse are fairly universal, as discussed in Fishman (1991). However, Boas does note that Texas German seems to retain its morphosyntactic features to a greater degree than is usual among dying languages. The reasons behind the decline of Texas German are all too common: status as a minority language, discrimination, lack of official legal status, disuse due to perceived economic and social advantages of the majority language. In the case of Texas German, the language enjoyed considerable prestige in its early days, when significant parts of Texas were entirely German speaking. This situation declined as roads better connected different areas of the country, causing an influx of English-only speakers into the New Braunfels area and an exodus of native Texas German speakers to bigger cities in order to find jobs. World War II played a large role in the branding of German as an "un-American" language, not only in the passing of English-only laws for schools and even some public spaces, but a decline in even private use by native speakers, who considered themselves Americans and did not want to engage in activities that were perceived as unpatriotic.

On a personal note, this book held my interest as a non-speaker of German, in that it is my heritage language yet I have inherited only three phrases from my German-speaking ancestors: was machst du, 'what are you doing?', nicht so laut, 'not so loud!', and gesundheit, 'bless you!' Both my maternal grandfather and my maternal grandmother were of German stock, the latter more recently than the former. However, none of my German-speaking ancestors passed their native tongue on to their children. Even my grandfather's great-grandfather Valentine Denzer, who was born in Germany, spoke English for most of his life, even keeping his personal diary in English during the Civil War. I think I too inherited this tendency: before I became a linguist, I was of the mind that if I had children in a foreign country, I would see no reason to teach them English, and that while I would continue speaking English to my family back home, I would use the local language during the rest of my life. Clearly this tendency stems from the desire for your children to have a better life than you had, and the belief that any deviation from the norm results in social difficulty and financial loss. It doesn't help any that this belief is at least somewhat accurate; while speaking another language is never a handicap, identifying first and foremost with a language or culture other than English can be a stumbling block in the United States. This same attitude has contributed not only to the decline of Texas German, but almost every indigenous language. In the case of indigenous languages, mandatory boarding schools, where children were beaten for speaking their native languages, certainly had an enormous impact as well, but in modern times, it is primarily the belief that identifying as English-speakers will help their children which keeps native speakers from passing on the language they grew up speaking.

"The Life and Death of Texas German" is a valuable resource for researchers in many areas of linguistics and anthropology. The Texas German Dialect Archive is likewise an incredibly valuable resource, especially since it may soon represent the last data available on Texas German. Boas offers a wealth of data on Texas German, not only on phonological and morphosyntactic phenomena that distinguish Texas German from Standard German, but also on speaker attitudes toward Texas German, including how often speakers used Texas German historically and in modern times. In many ways Texas German parallels the plight of indigenous languages of Americas, coming from a proud tradition of vigorous use, and falling into decline as English gained ground as the majority language associated with social status and economic advantage. Given the large percentage of readers who come from a Germanic background, Boas' book will no doubt also be of interest on a more personal level, with German as a heritage language which has been lost in many families. Boas' book is eminently readable and clearly written, presenting a valuable introduction to Texas German for the non-expert, as well as giving useful commentary on language death in general.

Apostrophe's

It's become quite common recently (unless this is the recency illusion striking again) for people to get confused and use apostrophes in plural forms, e.g., dog's for dogs. I'm not usually one to criticize non-standard usages, but this one has me puzzled. How do people get confused about this? 's is essentially never used in the plural, except for capitalized acronyms which haven't been lexicalized, and even then I think only MLA recommends using 's. So it's not a case of people being unsure when to use it for plurals and when not to; the rule is never use them.

So why is everyone so confused? The nature of this error makes it extremely difficult to research, since you have to hand pick the true instances, as opposed to the (still) more common genetive 's. I did find this gem through a google search: Hey guy's. I was wondaring do you love dog's or cat's? I like dog's!!! Please say dog's. Dog's rock! (Keep in mind that this was on what appears to be a forum for pre-adolescents and younger people in general.) In this case it seems the poster has internalized the rule as being that plural morphology in English is always 's. But as I said before, since this is never true, how to people get confused? My guess is simply interference from the genitive. I know from experience that people have trouble figuring out the difference between guy's and guys' (or guys's). Thus the confusion is not a grammatical one based on what plural marker to use, but a typographic one, in that people often see 's after a noun, and somehow they generalized it to plural marking.

I'd be interested in researching this further, but I'm at a loss for how to do a search for forms.

Structural ambiguity

A competitor in a Food Network show I watched recently was described as an "award-winning cake and sugar artist". Fairly straightforward, but my language faculty at first wanted to parse this is [[award-winning cake] and [sugar artist]] rather than [award-winning [cake and sugar] artist]. This is essentially the opposite of low attachment, so I'm not sure what was going on. Perhaps a desire for coordinated phrases to be coordinated as high as possible in the syntactic structure of the phrase.

Extended break

I'm not planning on doing any more updates until probably early next month, since I've started classes now, in addition to developing ESL materials for PronouncePro and working on some abstracts, papers, and a book review. Check back on October 3. If there are topics you're interested in hearing about this semester, feel free to post them in the comments section.

Two stories

I recently picked up the second season of the NBC police procedural show "Life" and have been watching it this weekend. In one of the episodes a crime takes place on an unnamed reservation in the desert near Los Angeles. As I watched, I tried to figure out what tribe it was supposed to be, mostly based on the language (after all, I am a linguist). What could it be? Western Pomo perhaps? I'm not familiar with many Uto-Aztecan languages, so I attempted to look the episode up online to see what language the actors were speaking during the few non-English lines of dialog. But suddenly I caught the word wašiču, 'white man' in Lakota (which, ironically, I learned not from my Lakota textbook or dictionary, but from my wife, who has a near-encyclopedic knowledge of the movie "Dances with Wolves"). This could be taken two ways. If we want to nitpick, we could get offended that the producers saw no need to use actual tribal members from the area or research the correct language for the tribe. Or if we want to be charitable we could be grateful that in a major network sitcom they actual decided to use Native actors speaking a Native language.

The second story is short, and comes from Bruce Rigsby via Phil Cash's Nez Perce mailing list. I've removed the name since I'm not sure if it would appropriate to reproduce here.

"Years ago several Old People on the Umatilla Reservation told me much the same account about ------, but it centred on the parable that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. The old man meant to say quu'ys haama "rich man", but mistakenly said k'uuys haama "indecently exposed man"!"

Qeciyew'yew', Bruce, for showing us that Freudian slips don't just occur in Indo-European languages.

Why linguistics is useful when learning a foreign language

Betsy Lowe has been keeping me up to date on her endeavor to learn Hungarian, and the frustrations that go along with any attempt to learn a foreign language. She commented specifically on exceptions in vowel harmony, to which I replied:

"After a while those irregularites will start to resolve into patterns. For instance, my dad, who got his degree in linguistics, was at first puzzled by the Arabic definite article, which is usually al-, but the -l- changes to the first letter of the noun it attaches to in some cases. After a while he figured out that the -l- stays an -l- only when the first letter of the noun isn't a coronal consonant, and once he realized that he no longer had to memorize the cases; it was easy to figure them out."

As another example, in many languages velar stops become post-alveolar stops or alveolar fricatives before front vowels. Thus in Italian syllables originally beginning with /k/ now begin with tʃ, e.g., cibo, 'food' is pronounced tʃibo. In Italian the pattern is not difficult to remember even if you don't know any linguistics: c is k before a, o, and u, and tʃ before i and e. However, a little linguistics knowledge makes it even simpler: tʃ before front vowels, k elsewhere. Such knowledge is especially helpful in situations like the Arabic case, where without linguistic knowledge the learner merely has to memorize a long list of letters that take the article al- and another long list that take aC-, where C represents the first letter of the noun the article precedes.

The derivation of "Missoula"

As you know if you've read my little info box on the right side of this page, I currently live in Missoula, Montana. The derivation of the word name "Missoula" is somewhat opaque, but is generally agreed to derive from the Flathead (Selish) word nmesuletkʷ. However, not everyone agrees on the meaning of this word. I have heard perhaps most commonly from white people and historians "river of ambush/surprise", and from Native people "icy water", referring to glacial lake Missoula. Naturally I'm inclined to give more credence to the latter (though of course indigenous people are just as prone to folk etymologies as we Euro-Americans are). After doing some research it seems that my hunch was justified.

The easiest part of nmesuletkʷ to deconstruct (for a non-speaker of Salish) is the suffix -etkʷ, which means "liquid", often specifically in the sense of "water" in place names, cf. ntx̣ʷetkʷ, 'river'. The nmesul- part is a bit harder, but there are clues in several of the Salishan languages. The root sul seems to mean "cold" or "frozen": slsulčsti, 'his hands are freezing'; suł, 'froze'; cf. Spokane sul, 'cold'. The initial n- is presumably the locative marker present in many Salishan languages, including Spokane and Okanagan. The me- is the only part for which I was able to find an unequivocal answer, but may be a stem formative cognate with Okanagan -m-. So a rough translation would presumably be something like "place of the frozen water", quite likely a reference to glacial lake Missoula.