Einar Haugen


Einar Ingvald Haugen was an American linguist, author, and professor at University of Wisconsin–Madison and Harvard University.

Biography

Haugen was born in Sioux City, Iowa, to Norwegian immigrants from the village of Oppdal in Trøndelag, Norway. When he was 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. He earned his B.A. in 1928 and immediately went on to graduate studies in Scandinavian languages under professor George T. Flom at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he was awarded the Ph.D. in 1931.
In 1931 Haugen joined the faculty of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, 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 was also a member of the Board of Editors of the Norwegian-American Historical Association.
In 1972 he was awarded an honorary degree, doctor philos. honoris causa, at the Norwegian Institute of Technology, later part of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.
Haugen is credited with having pioneered American sociolinguistics Journal of Intercultural Studies. Volume 15, 1994 - Issue 1
and being a leading scholar within the field of Norwegian-American studies,
Cambridge University Press, 1995
including Old Norse studies. Perhaps his most important work was The Norwegian language in America: A Study in Bilingual Behavior. 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. Einar Haugen also wrote Norwegian English Dictionary/Norsk engelsk ordbok.
His last book was a biography of the Norwegian virtuoso violinist Ole Bull co-written with his daughter, Camilla Cai.

Memorials

The Einar and Eva Lund Haugen Memorial Scholarship has been established by the Norwegian-American Historical Association to honor Einar Haugen and his wife Eva Lund Haugen. Additionally, the Boston Chapter of the American-Scandinavian Foundation voted to establish the Einar and Eva Haugen Prize. The prize is awarded annually to an undergraduate or graduate student for excellence in the field of Scandinavian languages and literature at Harvard University.

Selected bibliography