Haugen, Einar (1906–1994)

Einar Ingvald Haugen was born in Sioux City, Iowa, April 19, 1906, to parents who had emigrated from Oppdal, South Trondelag, Norway, in 1899. Later, Haugen attended Morningside College in Sioux City, Iowa, for 3 years, then transferred to St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota, in 1928, where he received his BA degree. In 1931, he received his PhD from the University of Illinois. A bilingual himself, he was one of the earliest scholars of bilingualism in the United States. Haugen might have taught the first known course on bilingualism in the United States at the 1949 Linguistic Institute in Ann Arbor, Michigan. There, a graduate student, Uriel Weinreich, contacted him to ask for a copy of his bibliography. The two of [Page 339]them, Haugen and Weinreich, can be credited with developing the academic field of bilingualism and language contact in the United States. This entry describes Haugen's research.

In 1953, Haugen published The Norwegian Language in America: A Study in Bilingual Behavior, the same year as Weinreich published Languages in Contact. Haugen's attention to Norwegian in the United States, an immigrant language, led him to study bilingualism more broadly. Haugen's 1956 work, Bilingualism in the Americas, established him as the reigning expert on U.S. bilingualism. The book was a survey research guide for bilingual study and included works on education, politics, psychology, and sociology in North and South America to 1970. In this book, he included a section on the education of bilingual children in the United States. His sources were mostly from the American Southwest, and the literature he surveyed focused mostly on education strategies to overcome the “language handicap” of bilingual children. Haugen, however, provided other explanations for the bilingual children's failure, including their low socioeconomic status, the inadequate schools they attended, and the shortcomings of their teachers. In this work, Haugen also supported the use of mother-tongue instruction in teaching immigrant children.

As a linguist, Haugen did much to develop the field of language contact, where linguistic items of one language are used in the context of another. Basing his observations on those of Leonard Bloomfield, Haugen describes different kinds of borrowings and distinguishes between loan words, where both the form and the meaning of the word is borrowed, as in U.S. Spanish bildin (for edificio in Spanish, “building” in English), and loanshifts, where only the meaning is borrowed, for example; the word registrar in Spanish used with the meaning of “to register,” although its Spanish meaning is “to search.”

Haugen's interest in the bilingual community, beyond the bilingual individual, led him to pioneer two fields that are highly relevant for bilingual education in the 21st century: that of language planning and policy, and that of ecolinguistics. The term language planning is usually attributed to Haugen in describing the organized efforts to prepare a normative orthography, grammar, and dictionary that could be used as a guide for people writing and speaking in a heterogeneous speech community. His 1966 book Language Conflict and Language Planning: The Case of Modern Norwegian, described the organized efforts to provide a single officially authorized language norm for Norway. In 1983, Haugen proposed an overall model of the language planning process that is still useful today. Bilingual education clearly has a role in language planning, for its use in school raises the status of a language, and results in an increase in its number of users. This has been the case of, for example, the Basque Autonomous Community, where bilingual education has clearly helped stabilize Euskara (Basque) in relationship to Spanish.

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