Taking stock and looking forward: documenting a diasporic variety of Czech in Texas

Texas Czech, a highly endangered diasporic variety of the Czech language, has roots in the dialects of Moravian and Bohemian immigrants from Austria and later Austria-Hungary who began arriving in Texas in the 1850s. “Taking stock”, the paper situates this variety’s development in the context of literature on language contact and borrowing, heritage languages, and community language endangerment and loss in order to examine its main contact features. “Looking forward”, the article (1) demonstrates the need for a corpus-based approach to this and other diasporic varieties of Czech to help us better understand the intersection of incomplete acquisition and attrition, typological characteristics of languages in contact, and internally vs. externally induced language change under different sociolinguistic constraints, and (2) references the Texas Czech Legacy Project, whose main objective is to build a searchable corpus of Texas Czech speech to serve the community and aid scholarly research on Czech varieties in the diaspora.