Michael E. Krauss


Michael E. Krauss was an American linguist, professor emeritus, founder and long-time head of the Alaska Native Language Center. He died on August 11, 2019, four days before his 85th birthday. The Alaska Native Language Archive is named after him.
Krauss is known first and foremost as an Athabaskanist and Eyak language specialist, a language that became extinct in January 2008. However, he worked on all of the 20 Native languages of Alaska, 18 of which belong to the Na-Dené and Eskimo–Aleut language families.
Throughout his career, and most notably with his 1991 address to the Linguistic Society of America, Krauss focused awareness of the global problem of endangered languages. He worked to encourage the documentation and revitalization of endangered languages across the world.
Krauss joined the faculty of the University of Alaska Fairbanks in 1960 and served as director of the Alaska Native Language Center from its inception in 1972 until his retirement in June 2000. He remained active in efforts to document Alaska's Native languages and encouraged awareness of the global problem of endangered languages.

Education

Krauss received a B.A. from the University of Chicago ; M.A. from Columbia University, ; Certificat d'Etudes supérieures from the University of Paris ; and Ph.D. in Linguistics and Celtic from Harvard University. His dissertation was titled "Studies in Irish Gaelic Phonology & Orthography."

Irish

Krauss conducted fieldwork with Irish in Western Ireland

Nordic

Krauss conducted fieldwork with Nordic languages in Iceland and in the Faroe Islands.

Athabaskan comparative linguistics

After completing a dissertation on Gaelic languages Krauss arrived in Alaska in 1960 to teach French at the University of Alaska. But Krauss was clearly aware of and interested in the indigenous languages of Alaska prior to his arrival. In fact, while en route to Alaska he visited Harry Hoijer, the leading scholar of Athabaskan languages at the time. Arriving in Alaska he became immediately aware of the dire situation of the indigenous languages of Alaska and quickly turned his attention to documenting those languages, focusing initially on the Tanana language. This turned out to be quite fortuitous for scholars of Athabaskan comparative linguistics, as Lower Tanana nicely demonstrated a split in the Proto-Athabaskan *ts- series which was not evidenced in Hoijer's data. Although Krauss immediately communicated this new information to Hoijer, it was not incorporated into Hoijer's major Athabaskan monograph, printed in 1963. The Minto data did appear in a series of IJAL articles by Krauss in the mid to late 1960s, but it was some time before the existence of an additional Proto-Athabaskan affricate series became widely known.

Eyak

Krauss' largest contribution to language documentation was his work on Eyak, which began in 1961. Eyak was then already the most endangered of the Alaskan languages, and Krauss' work is all the more notable considering that it represents what today might be considered salvage linguistics. While some Eyak data had been previously available, they were overlooked by previous scholars, including Edward Sapir. However, Eyak proved to be a crucial missing link for historical linguistics, being equally closely related to neighboring Ahtna and to distant Navajo. With good Eyak data it became possible to establish the existence of the Athabaskan–Eyak–Tlingit language family, though phonological evidence for links to Haida remained elusive. Further, the system of vowel modifications present in Eyak inspired Krauss' theory of Athabaskan tonogenesis, whereby tone develops from vowel constriction.

Endangered languages

Michael Krauss' lecture at the Linguistic Society of America conference in January 1991 is often cited as a turning point which refocused the field of linguistics on documentation and inspired a systematic global effort to document the world's linguistic diversity. In his lecture, titled "The world's languages in crisis," Dr. Krauss famously warned: Michael Krauss contends that in the United States, children are only learning 20% of the world's remaining languages.

Selected bibliography

Monographs