Kurath, Hans, 1891-1992

Hans Kurath (13 December 1891 – 2 January 1992) was an Austrian-American linguist. He was full professor for English and Linguistics at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. The many varieties of regional English that he encountered during his trips convinced him of the necessity of completing a systematic study of American English. In 1926, he convinced the Modern Language Association to begin planning for the project, and in 1931, a pilot study of the New England region was initiated under his direction, eventually producing the Linguistic Atlas of New England. It soon became clear, however, that the undertaking was too complex to be completed by a single team of linguists. The project was thus expanded to eight additional regional operations. Kurath guided the vision and goals of the regional projects for three decades and oversaw the publication of a series of volumes that are known collectively as the Linguistic Atlas of the United States, the first linguistic atlas of the US. For that work, he received the Loubat Prize. His most influential contribution was his 1949 three-part division of American English dialects into North, Midland, and South, which identified 18 distinct speech areas in the Eastern United States and remains foundational to American dialectology. He was also the first main editor of the Middle English Dictionary. Together with Raven I. McDavid, Jr., he published a linguistic atlas of the Eastern United States, The Pronunciation of English in the Atlantic States.