Uriel Weinreich

Uriel Weinreich was a Polish-born American linguist whose 1953 book Languages in Contact became a foundational text of contact linguistics, systematically analyzing the linguistic and social consequences of bilingualism, including borrowing, interference and code-switching between languages in sustained contact. In 1968 Weinreich co-authored, with William Labov and Marvin Herzog, the influential paper Empirical Foundations for a Theory of Language Change, which argued that variability within a speech community is not noise to be filtered out but the necessary raw material through which language change actually happens, a position that became foundational to the field of variationist sociolinguistics. Weinreich was also a leading scholar of Yiddish, serving as an editor of the comprehensive Yiddish dictionary project associated with YIVO, the Yiddish Scientific Institute. Weinreich taught at Columbia University, where he chaired the linguistics department and mentored a number of linguists who went on to shape sociolinguistics and dialectology.