Els Oksaar

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Els Oksaar (born October 1, 1926 in Pärnu ; † December 9, 2015 in Hamburg ) was an Estonian - Swedish linguist who was a professor and sole professor of general linguistics at the University of Hamburg until 1992 . She was a member of the Estonian and Finnish Academy of Sciences as well as the Norwegian Academy of Sciences and the Academy of Sciences in Hamburg .

biography

Gravestone Els Oksaar , Volksdorf forest cemetery

Els Oksaar's linguistic research was strongly influenced by his own life. As a child of Estonian parents, she grew up in Sweden, but began her academic career in Germany . She studied German , English and Slavic at the University of Stockholm and general linguistics, phonetics and communication science at the University of Bonn . She received her doctorate in Bonn in 1953 and her habilitation took place in Stockholm in 1958. There she initially worked as a private lecturer and associate professor, before joining the University of Hamburg in 1967 as a professor of general and comparative linguistics . There she founded the Research Center for Language Contacts and Multilingualism and became its first director.

In 1992, the Hamburg Senate decided not to fill Els Oksaar's chair after her retirement in order to transfer the funds to the Technical University of Hamburg-Harburg .

Oksaar was a member of numerous scientific institutions at home and abroad. For example, she was a member of the Migration Council . The Universities of Helsinki (1986), Linköping (1987) and Tartu (1996) have awarded her honorary doctorates. In 1992 she received the Konrad Duden Prize.

Els Oksaar was buried in the forest cemetery in Hamburg-Volksdorf in grid square Af 75.

plant

Els Oksaar came into contact with many languages ​​and cultures at an early age and is in the linguistic tradition of Roman Jakobson .

Oksaar characterizes her work as pedolinguistics , the study of language acquisition in children, and in particular children's multilingualism . Her main work is essentially based on the observation of the language development of her own son (there he appears as a "Hamburg child at the age of three"), whom she raised with five mother tongues (Estonian, Swedish, German, English and French) . Your son is now a lawyer in Hamburg.

Oksaar also established the cultural theory , which states that, like different languages ​​express the same thought in different ways, different cultures express the same forms of communication in different ways, namely as Kultureme .

Examples of published writings by Els Oksaar are:

  • Language acquisition - language contact - language conflict . Berlin 1984.
  • Cultural theory. A contribution to language usage research. Göttingen 1988. (= reports from the meetings of the Joachim-Jungius-Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften e.V. Hamburg 6,3 (1988)).
  • Second language acquisition. Paths to multilingualism and intercultural understanding. Kohlhammer Verlag, Stuttgart 2003, ISBN 3-17-013708-5 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ https://rat-fuer-migration.de/verbindungen/
  2. ↑ Duden Prize for the linguist Professor Dr. Dr. hc mult. Els Oksaar . In: Mannheimer Hefte 1992, p. 82.
  3. ↑ Grave location in biography Els Oksaar at garten-der-frauen.de
personal data
SURNAME Oksaar, Els
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Estonian-Swedish linguist
DATE OF BIRTH October 1, 1926
PLACE OF BIRTH Parnu
DATE OF DEATH December 9, 2015
Place of death Hamburg