Dying Dialect Gets a Voice
FREDERICKSBURG ?- In a tidy wooden kitchen that smells of bread, Elizabeth Behrend slices a hard sausage she's just cut down from the smokehouse and tells about the time she and her husband, August, visited Germany to trace their roots.
She remembers standing on the soil where her husband's grandfather had lived. "I even sneaked a little. I have it somewhere, just a little bit of soil from that place," she said proudly.
And she remembers the reaction of the Germans they met, when they heard the American couple from Texas speaking a language they should have long since forgotten.
"People could not believe that we could still speak German," said Behrend, a 78-year-old fourth-generation Texan. "They invited their neighbors to hear us speak because they were so amazed by it, and so were their neighbors. They thought we spoke like their grandparents."
The couple, married 60 years in June, still speak the language of their parents and grandparents when they're alone, away from "the Americans," as they still sometimes call non-German speakers. They speak German with friends at card games or social events.
But their children never learned to speak fluently. The Behrends know that when they go, the language will likely die with them.
It's the same scenario with German families across the state, where only as many as 10,000 speakers of the Texas dialect survive in a state that boasted about 159,000 speakers in the 1940s. At this rate, the German dialect is expected to vanish from the Texas landscape within 30 years.
Before that happens, Hans Boas, a Germanic linguistics professor at the University of Texas, is working to record and preserve the dialect. In the past five years, Boas and his team have interviewed 199 Texas German speakers. He's trying to raise $500,000 for an endowment that would fund interviews with as many as 2,000 speakers in the coming decades.
Boas' goal is to leave a record of not just the unique vocabulary, peculiar sentence structure and popular idioms, but the history and culture that developed alongside the dialect since Germans began arriving in Texas 150 years ago.
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