Michael E. Krauss

Michael Krauss
Residence	Fairbanks, Alaska
Nationality	American
Fields	Linguistics

Michael E. Krauss (born August 15, 1934) is an American linguist, professor emeritus, founder and long-time head of the Alaska Native Language Center. As of February 2013, the Alaska Native Language Archive is named after him.

Krauss is known first and foremost as an Eyak language specialist, a language that became extinct in January 2008. However, he has worked on all of the 20 Native languages of Alaska, 19 of which belong to the Athabaskan-Eyak-Tlingit and Eskimo–Aleut language families. He does not believe in a hypothetical language family called Na-Dené.

With his 1991 address to the Linguistic Society of America, Krauss was among the first to create an awareness of the global problem of endangered languages. He has since worked to encourage the documentation and re-vitalization of endangered languages across the world.

Krauss joined the faculty of the University of Alaska Fairbanks in 1960 and served as director of the Alaska Native Language Center from its inception in 1972 until his retirement in June 2000. He remains active in efforts to document Alaska's Native languages and encouraged awareness of the global problem of endangered languages.

Krauss received a B.A. from University of Chicago (1952); M.A. from Columbia University, (1954); and Ph.D. from Harvard University (1959)

Krauss conducted fieldwork with Gaelic in Western Ireland (1956–1958)

Krauss conducted fieldwork with Norse languages in Iceland and in the Faroe Islands (1958–1960).

After completing a dissertation on Gaelic languages Krauss arrived in Alaska in 1960 to teach French at the University of Alaska. But Krauss was clearly aware of and interested in the indigenous languages of Alaska prior to his arrival. In fact, while en route to Alaska he visited Harry Hoijer, the leading scholar of Athabaskan languages at the time. Arriving in Alaska he became immediately aware of the dire situation of the indigenous languages of Alaska and quickly turned his attention to documenting those languages, focusing initially on the (Lower) Tanana language. This turned out to be quite fortuitous for scholars of Athabaskan comparative linguistics, as Lower Tanana nicely demonstrated a split in the Proto-Athabaskan *ts- series which was not evidenced in Hoijer's data. Although Krauss immediately communicated this new information to Hoijer, it was not incorporated into Hoijer's major Athabaskan monograph, printed in 1963. The Minto data did appear in a series of IJAL articles by Krauss in the mid to late 1960s, but it was some time before the existence of an additional Proto-Athabaskan affricate series became widely known.

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