Einar Haugen

This article is about the American linguist. For the Norwegian linguist, see Odd Einar Haugen .

Einar Ingvald Haugen (born April 19, 1906 in Sioux City , Iowa, † June 20, 1994 ) was an American linguist .

School and education

Haugen was born in a settlement of Norwegian immigrants. The first language he learned was Norwegian . He only learned English at school. So he got to know bilingualism from his own experience. He later wrote several books on the subject. In 1923 he passed the Abitur. From 1924 to 1927 he attended Morningside College, Sioux City, Iowa. In 1928 he received a Bachelor of Arts degree from St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota . In 1929 he received his Magister Artium degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana , Illinois . In 1931, he put his doctoral dissertation in front, bearing the title The New Norse Movement in Norway ( "The New Norwegian movement in Norway"). In 1932 he married Eva Lund.

Professorships

From 1931 to 1964, Einar Haugen was Professor of Scandinavian Languages at the University of Wisconsin in Madison . In 1962 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . From 1964 to 1975 he was a professor at Harvard University in Cambridge , Massachusetts . In 1975 he retired . Between 1938 and 1982 he held various visiting professorships in North America, Europe and Australia.

Haugen's scientific work

Einar Haugen cannot be assigned to any particular linguistic school. Some works are structuralist , other works are more traditional and pre-structuralist. He was skeptical of the transformational- generative currents in linguistics. He worked in a very data-oriented manner and relied primarily on this data when building theories.

The sociolinguistic aspects play an important role in his work. This is expressed in his main research areas of bilingualism , dialectology and language planning .

One of his most important works is The Scandinavian Languages. An Introduction to their History , London and Cambridge (Massachusetts), 1976.

source

• Einar Haugen, The Scandinavian Languages. An introduction to their history , Helmut Buske Verlag, Hamburg 1984, ISBN 3-87118-551-5 (from the translator's afterword, Magnús Pétursson)
• Konrad Koerner : Einar Haugen as a Historian of Linguistics . In: American Journal of Germanic Languages ​​and Literatures (1997),

Web links

• Literature by and about Einar Haugen in the catalog of the German National Library