Uriel Weinreich: Contact Linguist, Historical Linguist, and Yiddishist Par Excellence

Abstract

This special issue of the Journal of Jewish Languages commemorates the fiftieth yortsayt1 of Uriel Weinreich (1926–1967), a pioneering scholar of language contact, language change, and the Yiddish language. In linguistics, Weinreich is best remembered as the author of the highly influential monograph Languages in Contact and a co-author, together with his doctoral students William Labov and Marvin I. Herzog, of the 1968 essay “Empirical Foundations for a Theory of Language Change,” which laid the groundwork for a unified approach to diachronic and synchronic variation. In Yiddish, Weinreich is best remembered as the author of the introductory textbook College Yiddish, the compiler of the Modern English-Yiddish Yiddish-English Dictionary, the founding editor of the Field of Yiddish, and the initiator and director of the Language and Culture Atlas of Ashkenazic Jewry. Weinreich’s numerous and varied contributions to scholarship—including articles, monographs, and edited volumes on topics ranging from formal semantics to folklore—are especially impressive considering the brevity of his career: tragically, Weinreich died from cancer at the age of forty, only sixteen years after completing his doctoral dissertation. The enormity of the loss— not only to his family and colleagues, but also to the fields of linguistics and Yiddish studies—is difficult to comprehend without careful consideration of