Texas Czech is a variety of Czech brought to central Texas by immigrants, mostly from Moravia with some from Bohemia, in the 19th century and kept alive in farming communities for more than a hundred years, absorbing English along the way. Today most of its fluent speakers are in their 80s and 90s.
The Texas Czech Legacy Project, directed by Dr. Lida Cope, documents and archives this dialect through oral-history recordings. I volunteer with the project as a language consultant, advisor, and analyst: helping shape the technical solutions and partnerships that are moving the project into its next phase, and using AI-assisted transcription and analysis to help the team work through a backlog of more than 450 hours of recordings, with human experts making every final call.
For me the work is also personal: it continues a family commitment to Czech language and community that goes back to my great-grandfather, Jan Štěpán, who emigrated from Bohemia in 1889.
Featured Talk
National Museum of Language, Speaker Series · May 16, 2026
Presented by Dr. Lida Cope and Anne Stepan, Ph.D.
A brief tour of the Czech diaspora and a look at what makes Texas Czech a unique diasporic variety of Czech — and how the Texas Czech Legacy Project is working to document it for future generations. Dr. Cope covers the project’s history and linguistic significance; I take the audience inside the AI workflow: the tools, the results, and the limits.
Slides: Scaling the Mission: How AI Is Accelerating Texas Czech Preservation (PDF)
Writing on the Project
- What Happens When You Point AI at a Dying Dialect? — April 2026. What AI transcription and analysis can and can’t do for an endangered dialect, and the detective story of a 1984 documentary that lost its audio.
- The Women Behind Texas Czech Preservation: Dr. Svatava Pírková Jakobson and Dr. Lida Cope — March 2026. The two scholars whose decades of archival work made this project possible.
- From Professional Linguist and Senior Executive to Texas Czech Preservationist — November 2025. How I came to this work, and my great-grandfather’s 140-year mission.
Learn More
- Texas Czech Legacy Project at the University of Texas at Austin
- LINDAT/CLARIAH-CZ Repository, the Czech research infrastructure for language data
- UWebASR, the University of West Bohemia’s browser-based speech recognition service, which we’re testing on Texas Czech recordings
- National Museum of Language — past events