Heinz Kloss


Heinz Kloss was a German linguist and internationally recognised authority on linguistic minorities.
He coined the terms "Abstandsprache" and "Ausbausprache" to try to describe the differences between what is commonly called a dialect and what is commonly called a language.
Kloss was also responsible for summing up previously publicly available statistical data on the North American Jewish population ; one copy was found in Hitler's library. The book was entitled Statistics, Media, and Organizations of Jewry in the United States and Canada. Hitler's personal copy of the book was obtained by Library and Archives Canada in 2018 and was restored, digitized and made available to the public in 2019. However the text of the book had already been available online from the Deutsche Nationale Bibliothek.

Selected works

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