Research on Texas English from UT Austin

The Fastest-Growing State? Texas.

Texas receives more net migration than any other state in the union, as the New York Times recently reported. If you're like us and you are interested in language, you wonder: where in Texas do the new arrivals end up settling down? At TELL we checked census data from 1970 until now and found out which counties in Texas have been growing, and which haven't. 

It turns out the five counties with the greatest increase in population all grew more than 1,100% in the fifty years from 1970 to 2020. Can you guess which county was at the top of the list, sporting a 1,533% population increase?

Check out our findings on this interactive map.

Student Research Video on Home To Texas Study

Three undergraduate student researchers made a research video for the 2025 Texas Student Research Showdown at UT. Under the expert guidance of Jennifer L. Smith, a documentary filmmaker and RTF major, and contributors/co-researchers Sydney Quant and Baylee Ross, the video shows what questions the students have been pursuing in our project, and how and why. 

Collaboration with Home To Texas

TELL is collaborating with Home To Texas (H2TX), an annual summer class for a group of UT students who go back to their Texas hometowns to intern with a local business and conduct local research for UT faculty members' projects. (Watch a 1-minute animation on this method.) One of these projects is TELL, and we have benefited greatly from the work of H2TX students, which amounts to a type of decentralized community-embedded fieldwork. 

In the 2024/25 academic year, three URAP students were hard at work analyzing the interviews that 66 H2TX students conducted in the summer of '24. Watch this space as we post updates about their research and our progress on studies of variation and change in Texas English. 

Were Texan Words Born out of the Pandemic?

On the latest Texan Translation, we discuss whether any language has created as many new words during the pandemic as German. Maybe Texas English? 

https://www.texasstandard.org/stories/toilet-paper-hamster-ercot-palypse-a-look-at-the-words-born-out-of-a-pandemic/

Virtual Talk about TELL's Digital Speech Archive

Lars Hinrichs and Axel Bohmann presented virtually at the University of Georgia on January 22nd, 3 p.m. C.S.T. 

See the presentation slides here.

Inaugural Speeches by Texan Presidents, Compared to Biden's

We ran some computational analyses on the inaugural speeches of US Presidents from Texas. And then we compared them to Joe Biden's inaugural speech from January 20th, 2021! Check out a summary of the findings here.

All Episodes of Texan Translation in One Place

The Texas Standard keeps a page where all episodes of Texan Translation are collected. Head on over there to find your favorites.

https://www.texasstandard.org/stories/categories/texan-translation/