Michael E. Krauss

Michael E. Krauss (August 15, 1934 - August 11, 2019) was an American linguist who founded and directed the Alaska Native Language Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, which he joined in 1960 and led from its 1972 founding until his 2000 retirement. He specialized in Athabaskan languages and the Eyak language, which became extinct in January 2008, working with all twenty Native languages of Alaska, most belonging to the Na-Dene and Eskimo-Aleut families, and he established the Athabaskan-Eyak-Tlingit language family connection. In a landmark 1991 address to the Linguistic Society of America he warned that linguistics risked presiding obliviously over the disappearance of ninety percent of its own field, an address widely credited with helping launch the modern language endangerment and documentation movement.