麻豆传媒

Wolfgang "Wolf" Wölck, SUNY Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in the Department of Linguistics, died on April 11. He was 92.

Wölck, a pioneering sociolinguist with a specialization in contact linguistics, is credited with a series of landmark innovations in the field.

He received a PhD from Goethe University Frankfurt in English and linguistics in 1963. His dissertation examined the sociophonetics of the Scots dialect of Buchan, Aberdeenshire, based on field research carried out in the early 1960s during a time when neither sociolinguistics nor sociolinguistic fieldwork were established concepts. He introduced the community profile, a method for determining the composition of samples for sociolinguistic studies of primarily geographically defined communities.

His pioneering work also included the discovery of the phenomenon of ethnolects, neighborhood-level varieties that were perceived well into the 1980s by Buffalonians as phonetic traces of the varieties of English spoken by the various immigrant communities of the 19th century.

Wölck led a longitudinal survey of Quechua-Spanish bilingualism from 1968-96 that was funded by the Peruvian government. This research resulted in policy recommendations for the standardization of Peruvian Quechua, and the language received official status in 1975. He was commissioned by the European Union to study the effects of the European Charter for Regional and Minority Languages throughout the EU membership countries.

Prior to joining UB in 1970, Wölck held appointments at Albert Ludwig University Freiburg and Indiana University Bloomington. At UB, he was chair of the Department of Linguistics from 1977-87 and again from 1989-91. He also served as director of UB’s Latin American Studies Program.

After retiring in 2001, Wölck continued teaching and advising students until 2012.

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