Abstract
This article focuses on the Texas Czech Legacy Project and its main initiative, the building of an open-access digital Texas Czech Dialect Archive. Texas Czech dialect is a product of over a century and a half of contact between Moravian Czech and English spoken in Texas. While its life cycle is rather typical of diasporic dialects, its resilient life span represents decades of self-sufficient existence in a rather enclosed sociolinguistic space organized around farming and small business ventures periodically rejuvenated by religious and fraternity activities without the need for an outside social world. Following a brief sketch of the socio-historical background of ethnic Czechs and Moravians in Texas, I discuss the objectives of the Project and the design of the Texas Czech Dialect Archive, bearing in mind the complexities involved in designing a product that is to serve community members, educators and students of the Czech language and culture, as well as a diverse group of researchers. The Project’s purposes and practical value of its digital archive for these multiple audiences are demonstrated using examples of both typical and idiosyncratic features of this diasporic dialect.
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©2016 by De Gruyter Mouton
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Multilingualism and minorities in the Czech sociolinguistic space: introduction
- Part I: The Czech sociolinguistic space in the Czech Republic
- The Czech language of Jews in Přemyslid Bohemia of the eleventh to fourteenth century
- The Others in the Czech Republic: their image and their languages
- Romani in the Czech sociolinguistic space
- Czech Sign Language in contemporary Czech society
- Part II: The Czech sociolinguistic space abroad
- Texas Czech Legacy Project: documenting the past and present for the future
- Czech immigrant dialects in the Northern Caucasus and Western Siberia
- Czech language minority in the South-eastern Romanian Banat
- Transnationalism and language maintenance: Czech and Slovak as heritage languages in the Southeastern United States
- Book Review
- Patrick Studer and Iwar Werlen: Linguistic diversity in Europe: current trends and discourses
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Multilingualism and minorities in the Czech sociolinguistic space: introduction
- Part I: The Czech sociolinguistic space in the Czech Republic
- The Czech language of Jews in Přemyslid Bohemia of the eleventh to fourteenth century
- The Others in the Czech Republic: their image and their languages
- Romani in the Czech sociolinguistic space
- Czech Sign Language in contemporary Czech society
- Part II: The Czech sociolinguistic space abroad
- Texas Czech Legacy Project: documenting the past and present for the future
- Czech immigrant dialects in the Northern Caucasus and Western Siberia
- Czech language minority in the South-eastern Romanian Banat
- Transnationalism and language maintenance: Czech and Slovak as heritage languages in the Southeastern United States
- Book Review
- Patrick Studer and Iwar Werlen: Linguistic diversity in Europe: current trends and discourses