Kloss, Heinz (1904–1987)

Heinz Kloss is one of the most acclaimed authorities on the history of language policy and language minority rights in the United States. Kloss's scholarly work spans nearly six decades, beginning in 1929, with his last publication posthumously in 1987. Kloss began his work in his native Germany, but in the 1930s early in his career, he made successive trips to the United States and Canada, where he served as director of the Centre international de recherche sur le bilinguisme of Laval University in Quebec. This entry discusses the significance of his scholarly work.

Among Kloss's more important German-language works were Das Volksgruppenrecht in den Vereinigten Staaten, Vols. 1–2 (The rights of ethnic groups in the United States), published in 1940; Das Nationalitaten-recht der Vereinigten Staaten (The rights of national minorities in the United States), published in 1963; studies on language maintenance among German American immigrants published in 1966; and The American Bilingual Tradition, first published in 1977 and republished in 1998. Kloss is best known in the United States for this latter work. Many U.S. language policy scholars have relied on that publication because of its thorough analysis of language laws, territorial language policies, and typology for classifying different types of language policies (promotion-oriented, tolerance-oriented, and restrictive).

Kloss's work has received widespread acclaim from persons interested in the history of bilingualism in the United States and North America. Researcher Shirley Brice Heath praised The American Bilingual Tradition for its use of primary sources and thorough discussion of legal decisions, policies, and legislation dealing with languages other than English in America. Similarly, Carolyn Toth, who has done substantial work on the history of German in the United States, referred to Kloss as an expert on U.S. history of bilingual education. Kloss's work is now becoming dated; nevertheless, given the dearth of subsequent historical work, Kloss's contributions remain foundational for studies for historical analyses of language policy, language discrimination, and linguistic rights.

Kloss's scholarship has been criticized from several directions. Most troublesome is the political context for Kloss's early work, which has been seriously questioned. Christopher Hutton's Linguistics and the Third Reich, for example, raises a number of significant issues. Kloss's early work began in the Weimar Republic (the government of Germany from 1919 to 1933) when there was extensive political and cultural debate regarding the German diaspora in Eastern Europe, Italy, and parts of Western Europe. When the National Socialists came to power, they took particular interest reuniting the German diaspora in North and South America. Hutton finds the ideological orientation of Kloss's work written during this period and Kloss's statements regarding racial and ethnic minorities particularly troubling. Did Kloss manage to sufficiently change some of his earlier biased sentiments, as the thrust of his later scholarship in support of more liberal agendas would seem to suggest? This is an important question for those who only read his later work.

Hutton contends that some Fascist-influenced tendencies in Kloss's writings were not exclusively confined to the National Socialism period. He notes [Page 412]that for Kloss, Germans played a prominent role among immigrant groups he studied in Das Volksgruppenrecht in den Vereinigten Staaten, which dealt with Germans in the United States. Kloss characterized them as being more analogous to a “people” (Volk) than an ethnic group (Volksgruppe). Kloss explained German language loss in the United States as resulting from different German “tribes” (Stamme) that emigrated from Germany with different dialects, which made German difficult to preserve. Kloss further attributed the loss of German to a lack of intellectual leadership and deterioration in the German immigrant pool after 1850, as well as to the ideological influence of world citizenship and atheism.

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