Texas German dying out
When Kaye Langehennig Wong was a little girl in Katy in the '60s, her parents would take her to visit her grandparents in Fredericksburg. “My grandparents lived in a stone house on Main Street,” she says. “I played with horny toads and walked down Main Street listening to the ladies in the shops talking in German.”
Wong's father spoke only German until he went to school. “My parents spoke German to each other when they didn't want us to know what they were saying,” she says. But like many parents of their generation, they didn't teach her.
The German Wong heard on Main Street was unlike German spoken anywhere else in the world. Texas German, the result of the flood of German immigrants into South Central Texas in the 19th century, is an amalgam of many of the dialects spoken in what is now Germany but was, until 1871, a collection of independent states.
When Germans settled in other parts of the U.S., they tended to cluster with people from the same original area. In Texas, they mixed freely, thus creating a unique language stew.
More at http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/local_news/article/Texas-German-dying-out-4343915.php .
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