The Einar Haugen Lecture
The lecture is an annual event at MultiLing held to celebrate the European Day of Languages.
See also previous lectures held between 2013-2024.
About the annual lecture
The renowned scholar Einar Haugen (1906 – 1994) was born into a Norwegian family in the US and grew up bilingually. His fascination with language led him to doctoral studies in linguistics and a career in language and linguistics that extended across many decades.
He served on the faculty of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and until his retirement as Professor of Scandinavian and Linguistics at Harvard University.
Haugen’s many influential works contributed to the then emerging field of sociolinguistics for which he is credited for having had an important impact, particularly in the domain of language policy. His pioneering work The Norwegian Language in America: A Study in Bilingual Behavior (1953) is a landmark study in the field of bilingualism.
The annual Einar Haugen lecture will pay tribute to this eminent Norwegian-American scholar and celebrate linguistic diversity.
Previous
Multilingual families navigate multiple languages, and their multilingual lives are shaped by space, history, and identity.
With Norwegian Sign Language celebrating its 200th anniversary in 2025, this year's Einar Haugen lecture will focus on signed languages and explore the relationship between human diversity and linguistic diversity. The hybrid lecture will be in English, with interpretation into Norwegian Sign Language.