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The Einar Haugen Lecture
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The study of heritage language speakers can shed light on fundamental issues in multilingualism. Professor Marit Westergaard will address some of these issues, with examples from heritage languages in Norway and Norwegian heritage language in North America.
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.