Max Weinreich

Max Weinreich
Born22 April 1894
Goldingen, Courland Governorate, Russian Empire (modern Kuldīga, Latvia)
Died29 January 1969(1969-01-29) (aged 74)
New York City, New York, U.S.
Occupationlinguist, sociolinguist
LanguageYiddish
Alma materUniversity of Marburg (1923)
Notable worksHistory of the Yiddish language, Hitler's Professors
Notable awardsGuggenheim Fellowship[1]
SpouseRegina Shabad
Children2 (Uriel and Gabriel)
RelativesZemach Shabad

Max Weinreich (Yiddish: מאַקס ווײַנרײַך[2] Maks Vaynraych; Russian: Мейер Лазаревич Вайнрайх, Meyer Lazarevich Vaynraykh; 22 April 1894 – 29 January 1969) was a Russian-American-Jewish linguist, specializing in sociolinguistics[3] and Yiddish, and the father of the linguist Uriel Weinreich, who, a sociolinguistic innovator, edited the Modern Yiddish-English English-Yiddish Dictionary.[4]

He is known for increasing language awareness of Yiddish as a standardized language; he popularised the phrase "A language is a dialect with an army and navy".

  1. ^ "Max Weinreich". John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Retrieved 2020-04-16. Fellow in Linguistics, 1955, 1956.
  2. ^ Roskies, David G. "David G. Roskies, ַמאַקס װײַנרײַך—אויף די שפּורן פֿון א לעבעדיקן עבֿר [Max Weinreich: In Search of a Usable Past], YIVO-bleter, n.s., 3 (1997): 308-318".
  3. ^ Murray, Stephen O. (1998). American Sociolinguistics: Theorists and Theory Groups. John Benjamins Publishing. p. passim. ISBN 90-272-2178-2.
  4. ^ Weinreich, Uriel (1968). ‏מאָדערן ענגליש־יידיש, יידיש־ענגליש ווערטערבוך. Schocken. ISBN 978-0-8052-0575-6.