New Benjamins Title: Roesch - Language Maintenance and Language Death

Karin Plijnaar karin.plijnaar at benjamins.nl
Thu Mar 22 11:02:27 UTC 2012


Language Maintenance and Language Death
The decline of Texas Alsatian
By Karen A. Roesch, University of Texas at Austin

Culture and Language Use 6
2012. xv, 253 pp.

Hardbound 978 90 272 0288 8 / EUR 99.00 / USD 149.00

e-Book - Sold by e-book platforms
978 90 272 7503 5 / EUR 99 / USD 149.00

This book provides the first extensive description of Texas Alsatian, a 
critically-endangered Texas German dialect, as spoken in Medina County 
in the 21^st 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.

Table of Contents

List of table xi-xii
List of figures xiii-xiv
List of illustrations xv-xvi
Chapter One. Introduction 1-34
Chapter Two. The sociohistorical context 35-68
Chapter Three. The lexicon of Texas Alsatian 69-92
Chapter Four. The phonology of Texas Alsatian 93-122
Chapter Five. The morphosyntax of Texas Alsatian 123-168
Chapter Six. Language attitudes 169-188
Chapter Seven. Language maintenance and death 189-204
Appendices 205-236
References 237-248
Index 249-254


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