TPDP
Welcome to the Texas Polish Dialect Project (TPDP)!
The TPDP is creating a central web-based resource to document the language, culture, and history of Polish immigrants to Texas. To achieve this goal, we will create the Texas Polish Dialect Archive (TPDA), a repository of audio-recordings gathered from descendants of Polish immigrants to Texas in the 19th century. The project will interview as many speakers of Texas Polish as possible to document Polish language and culture in Texas. Unfortunately, time is running out as Texas Polish is is not passed on to younger generations and is therefore quickly disappearing.
The goals of the TPDP are
- to record and preserve the Texas Polish dialect, as it reflects the rich cultural and linguistic traditions of the Texas Polish community;
- to gather information about linguistic diversity, so as to better understand the nature of language variation and change;
- to make our research on language differences and language change available to the general public; and
- to devote our collected research materials to improving educational programs on language, culture, and history.
The TPDP is housed in the Linguistics Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin and works together with similar UT Austin projects such as the Texas German Dialect Project, the Texas Czech Legacy Project, the Spanish in Texas Corpus Project, and the Texas English Linguistics Lab to document, analyze, and research multilingual communities across the Lone Star State. The TPDP, led by Agnieszka Makles and John Benjamin, is modeled after the Texas German Dialect Project and the Texas Czech Legacy Project.
We encourage anyone interested in the project, especially those who speak or know anyone who speaks Polish here in Texas, to contact Agnieszka and John.
