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Lida Cope
This article focuses on the Texas Czech Legacy Project and its main initiative, the building of an open-access digital Texas Czech Dialect Archive. Texas Czech dialect is a product of over a century and a half of contact between Moravian Czech and English spoken in Texas. While its life cycle is rather typical of diasporic dialects, its resilient life span represents decades of self-sufficient existence in a rather enclosed sociolinguistic space organized around farming and small business ventures periodically rejuvenated by religious and fraternity activities without the need for an outside social world. Following a brief sketch of the socio-historical background of ethnic Czechs and Moravians in Texas, I discuss the objectives of the Project and the design of the Texas Czech Dialect Archive, bearing in mind the complexities involved in designing a product that is to serve community members, educators and students of the Czech language and culture, as well as a diverse group of researchers. The Project’s purposes and practical value of its digital archive for these multiple audiences are demonstrated using examples of both typical and idiosyncratic features of this diasporic dialect.
