Lexical developments in Texas German

This paper offers new insights into on-going research on lexical borrowing in language contact situations by presenting a typology of lexical borrowings in Texas German (TxG), a critically endangered dialect that will go extinct within the next 30 years. We show that the lexicon of TxG has not undergone any dramatic changes over the past four decades and that the dialectal origins of words that were still apparent when Gilbert collected his data in the 1960s can still be found today. We also argue that TxG should be classified as "stage 2" in Thomason and Kaufman's (1988) 5-stage borrowing scale ("slightly more intense contact"), which is characterized by lexical borrowing and slight structural borrowing in combination with conjunctions and adverbial particles.

• Affiliations: 1: University of Texas at Austin