Particularly if one is a reader of Eric Flint’s Ring of Fire series, which of course I am. Texasdeutsch sounds a bit like Amideutsch from the books. Not quite the same — fewer English loan words, and the German is from a different time period — but close enough to make the BBC video at the link worth watching. Nice to see that somebody’s writing the language down, hey?
4 thoughts on “Tweet of the Day, This Texan-German Dialect Thing Is Interesting.”
Comments are closed.
My ex-wife had her parents divorce when she was about 10, which meant that when she was preparing for her bat mitzvah, her mom lived in the Chicago burbs and her dad lived in Texas. While visiting her dad in Texas for the summer, she was taking Hebrew classes for the bat mitzvah (and discovering what fire ant hills were the hard way, but that’s a different story). When she returned to Chicago at the end of the summer she went to class to continue studying Hebrew, but when she started speaking Hebrew for the first time in Chicago, the teacher just could not stop laughing. After finally regaining composure, the teacher apologized and said, “I’m sorry, it’s just that I’ve never heard Hebrew spoken before with a Texas accent.”
Reader’s Digest had a story once about a Jewish woman going to Texas to meet her prospective non-Jewish mother-in-law; the woman was worried about being accepted, and everything. So she was relieved when the first words out of the future MIL’s lips was “Shalom, y’all.”
Moe:
“Shalom Y’all” is a documentary from 2003 that’s well worth a watch: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0365746/
.
My native Texan wife has the saying etched on a tile in our kitchen.
I have known quite a few speakers. A friend of mine went to Heidelberg on a Fulbright and decided to try out his German; the person he spoke to asked him where he’d been hiding since the time of the Kaiser.