Language and Its Ecology: Essays in Memory of Einar Haugen PDF
Preview Language and Its Ecology: Essays in Memory of Einar Haugen
Language and its Ecology W DE G Trends in Linguistics Studies and Monographs 100 Editor Werner Winter Mouton de Gruyter Berlin · New York Language and its Ecology Essays in Memory of Einar Haugen Edited by Stig Eliasson Ernst Häkon Jahr Mouton de Gruyter Berlin · New York 1997 Mouton de Gruyter (formerly Mouton, The Hague) is a Division of Walter de Gruyter & Co., Berlin. © Printed on acid-free paper which falls within the guidelines of the ANSI to ensure permanence and durability. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication-Data Language and its ecology : essays in memory of Einar Haugen / edited by Stig Eliasson , Ernst Hakon Jahr. p. cm. - (Trends in linguistics. Studies and mono- graphs ; 100) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 3-11-014688-6 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Linguistics. I. Haugen, Einar Ingvald. 1906- II. Eliasson, Stig. III. Jahr, Ernst Häkon, 1948- IV. Series. P26.H34..36 1997 410-dc21 97-3913 CIP Die Deutsche Bibliothek - Cataloging-in-Publication-Data Language and its ecology : essays in memory of Einar Haugen / ed. by Stig Eliasson ; Ernst Häkon Jahr. - Berlin ; New York : Mouton de Gruyter, 1997 (Trends in linguistics : Studies and monographs ; 100) ISBN 3-11-014688-6 NE: Eliasson, Stig [Hrsg.]; Trends in linguistics / Studies and monographs © Copyright 1997 by Walter de Gruyter & Co., D-10785 Berlin. All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Typesetting and Printing: Arthur Collignon GmbH, Berlin. Binding: Lüderitz & Bauer, Berlin. Printed in Germany. Preface Einar Haugen (1906-1994) Einar Ingvald Haugen was a truly outstanding scholar, with broad inter- ests in linguistics, literature and culture. He won wide and lasting interna- tional renown especially for his work in sociolinguistics, the sociology of language and Scandinavian linguistics.1 In sociolinguistics and the sociol- ogy of language, he carried out pioneering work on bilingualism and language planning, studies that made him a leader in these fields. In Scandinavian linguistics, he contributed insightful original work to both synchronic description and historical linguistics and provided masterly syntheses of Scandinavian language history. He cultivated many other fields as well, including general linguistics, language teaching, dictionary making, dialectology, runology, the history of linguistics, linguistic bibli- ography, and literary biography. In addition to all this, he played an important role in maintaining and developing cultural relations between the Nordic countries and the U. S. Haugen's long and very active professional life was intimately inter- woven with his double roots and upbringing in the United States and Scandinavia. His father and mother, who were both native to Oppdal in S0r-Tr0ndelag in central Norway, were first-generation immigrants to the U. S. who settled, in 1899, in a Norwegian neighborhood in Sioux City, Iowa. Here, Einar was born on April 19, 1906 as their only surviving child, and here he spent most of his childhood. The cultural and linguistic milieu of this immigrant community had an impact that was to remain with him all his life; important facets of his personal thinking and atti- tudes were molded in this environment. Professionally, he time and again drew upon his intense personal exposure to immigrant language and bi- lingualism. His first language was Norwegian; only at school did he acquire a full native command of English. A crucial further impetus to his linguistic development was the temporary return of the family to Norway. Between 1914 and 1916, when he was eight to ten years old, he spent two years in Oppdal which strongly reinforced his ties to Norway and added further linguistic experiences that were later to be reflected in his schol- vi Preface arly work. Haugen's undergraduate education began at Morningside Col- lege, Sioux City, Iowa, from 1924 to 1927, and continued at the predomi- nantly Norwegian-American St. Olaf College, Northfield, Minnesota, where he completed his B. A. in 1928. He pursued his graduate studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana, where he earned an M. A. in 1929, and two years later, in 1931, he was awarded his Ph.D. on the basis of a dissertation on the creation of the New-Norwegian variety of Norwegian, The origin and early history of the New Norse movement in Norway. An- other highly significant juncture in his life occurred in 1932, when he married Eva Lund, the daughter of a Norwegian-language newspaper editor in Decorah, Iowa. Born in Kongsvinger, a small town northeast of Oslo, Norway, on February 4, 1907, Eva had emigrated to the U. S. together with her parents in 1919. Eva was to maintain a lifelong dedica- tion to Einar's work, serving as a consultant, proofreader, co-author, and as someone who always kept an eye on the many practical necessities of life, even when Einar occasionally lost himself in the excitements of scholarship and linguistics. Haugen's subsequent professional career pro- ceeded at a smooth and steady pace towards a position of great promi- nence. In 1931, he joined the faculty of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, as an assistant professor of Scandinavian languages. He was promoted to associate professor in 1936, professor in 1938, and was Vilas Research Professor in Scandinavian Languages and Linguistics from 1962 to 1964. In the course of his 33 years at the University of Wisconsin, he saw its Scandinavian unit grow from a small program to a full-fledged department. It was also during this period of his life that he served as the cultural relations attache at the U. S. Embassy in Oslo from 1945 to 1946, as President of the Linguistic Society of America in 1950, and as President of the Ninth International Congress of Linguists, held in Cam- bridge, Massachusetts, in 1962. Haugen was much attached to the conge- nial academic environment at Wisconsin and to his personal friends there. It was thus only after great hesitation that he was prepared to consider a flattering call issued to him by prestigious Harvard University. Finally, however, he overcame his doubts and accepted. For the following eleven years, from 1964 until his retirement in 1975, he was Victor S. Tho- mas Professor of Scandinavian and Linguistics at Harvard. Soon after his arrival there, in 1966, he was also selected as a member of the Permanent International Committee of Linguists (CIPL), on which he served until 1972. His retirement in 1975 was followed by another very active period in his life. Free of teaching and administrative duties, he was able to engage in his research full time, and a new outburst of publications in a Preface vii variety of areas ensued. A resident of Belmont, Massachusetts for thirty years, he died, at the age of 88, on June 20, 1994 at Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge. Sixteen months later, on October 25, 1995, in Fort Wayne, Indiana, Eva, his ever-loyal life companion, followed him. To say that Einar Haugen was a prolific author is almost an under- statement. He authored, co-authored, translated, and edited dozens of scientific monographs, biographies, textbooks and dictionaries and pub- lished a multitude of articles and reviews.2 With his monumental mono- graph The Norwegian language in America: A study in bilingual behavior, first published in two parts in 1953 and reissued in one volume in 1969, he achieved his international breakthrough. In this study, derived from two decades of fieldwork, he documented the dislocated varieties of Nor- wegian spoken in the U. S., offshoots of Norwegian which he knew were doomed to perish. Based on data from Wisconsin and parts of neighbor- ing states, the work focuses in its linguistic parts on English loanwords in American Norwegian and their phonological, morphological and syn- tactic adaptation to Norwegian patterns. As an outgrowth of this work, another classic study, Bilingualism in the Americas. A bibliography and research guide, from 1956, has served as an indispensable tool for many beginners as well as more advanced researchers in bilingualism. Together with Uriel Weinreich's Languages in contact, also published in 1953, these and other related studies by Haugen furnished important new empirical, methodological and theoretical foundations for research on language contact and bilingualism, and also, to an extent, stimulated the field of contrastive analysis, which was launched in full in Robert Lado's Linguis- tics across cultures in 1957. Haugen's interest in language planning and language standardization was already established in his doctoral disserta- tion of 1931. He returned to this problem full-scale in his 1966 book Language conflict and language planning. The case of modern Norwegian, which provides analyses with important implications for language plan- ning in many other countries as well. Another of Einar Haugen's exceptional achievements is that he pro- vided a unified account of the history of the Scandinavian languages, tracing the main lines of their development from Proto-Germanic to the modern Scandinavian languages and dialects. In the process, he made Scandinavian language history accessible to a wide international audi- ence. His book The Scandinavian languages. An introduction to their his- tory, originally published in 1976 and translated into German as Die skandinavischen Sprachen. Eine Einführung in ihre Geschichte in 1984, still remains the only work of this size in any language on Scandinavian lan-
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