I love this story from today's Houston Chronicle, UT professor works to save Texas German. Actually the prof, Hans Boas, is not working to "save" the central Texas dialect -- which is still spoken by a now rapidly diminishing population of fourth-generation descendents of immigrants -- but to preserve some vestige of it for scholars.
When I lived in Texas in the 1970s I was perhaps a little more aware of the German-flavored towns of the Hill Country -- Fredericksberg chief among them -- since I was a Lutheran. Even then Fredericksburg bragged about its Germanic heritage with cutesy architecture, lots of German restaurants and bakeries, an Oktoberfest, etc.
But the great thing about this story, by Lisa Falkenberg, is the way it hints at how immigrant cultures are assimilated to the point where they become non-threatening and cute. After recounting discrimination against germans during the two world wars, the story quotes one resident: "Everybody called us the Krauts and we were kind of isolated and weird and they didn't know what to make of us. Now we're quaint."
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