The Texas German Dialect Archive as a tool for analyzing sound change

This paper describes technical features of the Texas German Dialect Project (TGDP) whose goal is to record and document the remnants of the rapidly eroding Texas German dialect spoken in central Texas. At the center of the project’s current activities is the creation of the Texas German Dialect Archive (TGDA), an on-line archive of interviews with native speakers of Texas German that have been recorded since January 2002. Once the first 100 hours of interviews are archived by the TGDA, a database will be created that covers the entire inventory of Texas German phonemes including their respective allophones in different environments. Each database entry will be linked to sound files serving as examples. At the next stage, a second database will be created which will contain corresponding historical information for each phoneme and its allophones based on descriptions (and, when available, historical recordings) from the 1950s and 1960s. Once the two databases are linked, researchers will be able to conduct on-line research on sound change in Texas German. 1