An obscure dialect called Texas-German is about to disappear.
It was easy for Dorothy Schneider to get in touch with her European roots growing up in the tiny farming community of Galle, Texas, in the 1930s and 1940s.
“There was German spoken everywhere,” the now 75-year-old said recently. “It was our first language in my family. You could speak it at the church, at the butcher shop, all over the place.”
Today, though she doesn’t live far from her girlhood community, it is almost impossible for Schneider to find people who will speak her native tongue with her. She knows it is dying, and she can’t do anything about it.
“It’s terrible, but I just have to accept this,” she said.
As the obscure dialect of Texas German nears extinction, an entire culture and way of life that deeply shaped Texas is about to disappear.
A century ago, more than 100,000 people in a large swathe of south central Texas spoke the dialect. To the uninitiated, it sounds like a strange mishmash of English and German.
Read the rest of this interesting article HERE
My grandparents on my mother’s side spoke German quite often in their house, I’m pretty sure it wasn’t Texas-German however as they came from Missouri and moved to Texas when my grandfather’s job with the VA caused him to come to Waco.
My father’s family settled in Illinois where they farmed. The offspring moved down to Kansas then to the Southwest, Arizona and El Paso, following the railroad jobs. He told me that his grandfather would not speak German except to his own mother who was already an old woman when she arrived here. My father made the point that immigrants should adopt the language and laws of our country. We lived only blocks from the Rio Grande River.
I didn’t know about this Texas-German. How did those people survive and thrive without ESL classes and ballots written in German?
Guten morgan, y’all!
At least they left us chicken fried steak.
Und Schlitterbahn!
Thank God for CFS!
Don’t forget the Kolaches! I love the Hill Country. I’ve got Germans from there in my family but I’ve never heard the language they’re talking about here.
Maybe that’s why it’s near dead.
The German dialect in Nebraska, where my ancestors settled, was typical midwestern nothingness mixed with profuse quantities of a German-Russian combo that no one but they could understand!
Admiral Nimintz was from a place called Fredericksburg,Texas.Would that be in the vicinity?
Fredericksburg is 100 miles NW, in the Texas Hill Country.
The area they are talking about where Texas-German was spoken is the Texas Hill Country.
Why were the Germans attracted to that part of the country?Memphis circa 1860 had a very large German population,as did of course St. Louis.
According to the Texas State Historical Society, since the 1800s Germans were the dominate sub-culture of Texas making up to 17% of the total population. There was a band of German settlement from the coastal planes stretching into the Hill Country .
http://Www.tshonline.org/handbook/online/articles/png02
Probably through the port of Galveston.Forgotten that the first great wave of non British immigrants in the 19th Century came from Germany,escaping the political tumult there.
This from wiki:
They’reWe’re everywhere!!!We’re everywhere!!!
Aren’t we though?!
I heard on some show a while ago that the Nazis had a sub in the Gulf and were heading toward Texas. I wonder if they were hoping for some support from the Texan Germans? Probably not or at least I believe they would have been sorely disappointed. My 1/2 German great-grandfather married a nice Jewish girl, though she became a Christian. Both were born in the Hill Country.
You can find them in the Panhandle too… Umbarger to be exact.
http://mix941kmxj.com/umbarger-german-sausage-festival-is-this-sunday/
And whenever I had to drive to Dallas for a meeting or court when I was a lawyer I would take a slight detour (on taxpayer dime of course — a whole 15 minutes longer drive) through Muenster, Texas and have Jager Schnitzel at The Center….
http://www.thecenterrestaurant.com/
Always worth trying to preserve old languages and dialects.Over in part of Syria a few thousand people still speak Aramaic,the everyday language of Jesus.
Jesus loves you, Scott M.
Much obliged!
Assimilation all well and good (and will always encourage it), but still a shame to hear a dialect completely fade into the sunset.
Cajun French is still an enduring lingua in south central Louisiana,though it fades over time.
Speaking of Texas, I heard a rather disturbing fact yesterday. If I told you President Obama won Austin you probably wouldn’t be surprised, but Houston and Dallas? O.K., you say, no surprise with Houston; lots of immigrants, a lot of blue collar folks; maybe Houston… But Dallas?!
This guy’s article, http://www.hoover.org/publications/defining-ideas/article/140451
provides some good analytics on the subject. I’ve thought Texas was ahead of the rest of the nation in its support of the 10th amendment and the Constitution, but could it be it’s lagging? The rural folk in Indiana, Illinois, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Iowa… used to have similar sensibilities and they were able to outvote their respective state’s big cities, but the demographics have made that impossible now. Can it be Texas will suffer the same fate?
Paging Goozer…
(from the article)
“Sooner or later, the Electoral College will probably give way to a national popular vote for president. But rural America was set on a path of inexorable decline a half century ago when the Supreme Court rejected the plea of rural communities for representation as communities in our extended republic. Those communities are the red counties of blue America.”
Well,in Tennessee we have 2 Democrat islands in a Republican ocean…Memphis and Nashville.Our State Senate is 27-6 GOP.Our State House is about 70-29 GOP.
Dallas is surrounded by conservative suburbs. All the conservatives moved out long ago.
If you look at Figure 3 in the article you referenced you will see that Harris County (Houston) and Dallas County (Dallas) went Republican.
There is a trend especially with the migration of people from the north and CA for Texas to become more blue. The mayor of San Antonio, a Democrat said that Texas would soon become purple…maybe so.
Nice thread hijack by the way.
“Nice thread hijack by the way.”
You’re a discussion/debate-sparker! Nothin’ wrong with that.
It’s too much work to create new posts from my phone. You kids don’t know how lucky you have it, with your social media and tablet PCs.
The internet is hard, mommy.
Liberals love the Electoral College now.