Einar Haugen
Einar Ingvald Haugen (
April 19,
1906 -
June 20,
1994) was a
linguist and
Professor at
University of Wisconsin and
Harvard University.
Haugen (pronounced HOW-gən) was born in
Sioux City, Iowa to Norwegians from the town of
Oppdal in
Norway. As a young child, the family moved back to Oppdal for a few years, but then returned to the
United States. He attended
Morningside College in Sioux City but transferred to
St. Olaf College to study with
Ole Edvart Rølvaag, where he earned his B.A. in 1928. He immediately went on to graduate studies in linguistics at the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he was awarded his
Ph.D. in
1931.
Haugen joined the faculty of the University of Wisconsin in 1931, where he stayed until
1962. He was made Victor S. Thomas Professor of Scandinavian and Linguistics at Harvard University in 1964, and stayed here until his retirement in
1975. Haugen served as president of the
Linguistic Society of America, the
American Dialect Society, and the
Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Study.
Haugen is credited for having pioneered the field of
sociolinguistics and being a leading scholar within the field of Norwegian-American studies, including
Old Norse studies. Perhaps his most important work was
The Norwegian language in America; A study in bilingual behavior (ISBN 0253341159). In addition to several important works within these fields, he wrote the authoritative work on the dialect of his ancestral home of Oppdal and a book entitled
The Ecology of Language, with which he pioneered a new field of linguistics later called
Ecolinguistics.
Haugen also wrote
Norwegian American Dictionary/Norsk engelsk ordbok (ISBN 0-299-03874-2).
*
Memorial minute from Harvard University
