Heinz Kloss

Heinz Kloss (30 October 1904, Halle, Saxony-Anhalt – 13 June 1987) was a German linguist and internationally recognised authority on linguistic minorities.

He coined the terms "Abstandsprache" and "Ausbausprache" to try to describe the differences between what is commonly called a dialect and what is commonly called a language.

Kloss was also responsible for summing up previously publicly available statistical data on the North American Jewish population (without any stated political aim); one copy was found in Hitler's library. The book was entitled Statistics, Media, and Organizations of Jewry in the United States and Canada. Hitler's personal copy of the book was obtained by Library and Archives Canada in 2018 and was restored, digitized and made available to the public in 2019. However the text of the book had already been available online from the Deutsche Nationale Bibliothek.

Selected works

• Kloss, Heinz (1929). Nebensprachen: eine sprachpolitische Studie über die Beziehungen eng Verwandter Sprachgemeinschaften. Wilhelm Braumüller, Universitäts-Verlagsbuchhandlung. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |authormask= ignored (|author-mask= suggested) (help)
• Kloss, Heinz (1940–1942). Das Volksgruppenrecht in den Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika. Essener Verlagsanstalt. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |authormask= ignored (|author-mask= suggested) (help) (two volumes)
• Kloss, Heinz (1967). Abstand languages and Ausbau languages. Vol. 9. pp. 29–41. doi:10.1515/9783110860252.278. ISBN 9783110860252. {{cite book}}: |journal= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |authormask= ignored (|author-mask= suggested) (help)
• Kloss, Heinz (1976). "Abstandsprachen und Ausbausprachen" [Abstand-languages and Ausbau-languages]. In Göschel, Joachim; Nail, Norbert; van der Elst, Gaston (eds.). Zur Theorie des Dialekts: Aufsätze aus 100 Jahren Forschung. Zeitschrift fur Dialektologie and Linguistik, Beihefte, n.F., Heft 16. Wiesbaden: F. Steiner. pp. 301–322. ISBN 978-3-515-02305-4. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |authormask= ignored (|author-mask= suggested) (help)
• Kloss, Heinz (1977). The American Bilingual Tradition. Newberry House. ISBN 978-0-912066-06-6. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |authormask= ignored (|author-mask= suggested) (help)

Further reading

• Auburger, Leopold (1988). "In memoriam Heinz Kloss". Zeitschrift für Dialektologie und Linguistik (in German). 55 (1): 49–56. JSTOR 40503043.
• Hutton, Christopher (1999). "'A complicated young man with a complicated fate, in a complicated time': Heinz Kloss and the ethnic missionaries of the Third Reich". Linguistics and the Third Reich: Mother-tongue Fascism, Race and the Science of Language. London: Routledge. pp. 144–178. ISBN 978-0-415-18954-5.
• McConnell, Grant D. (1988). "In Memoriam: Dr. Heinz Kloss". Language in Society. 17 (4): 619. doi:10.1017/s0047404500013221. JSTOR 4167990.
• Wiley, Terrence G. (2002). "Heinz Kloss revisited: National Socialist ideologue or champion of language-minority rights?". International Journal of the Sociology of Language. 154 (154): 83–97. doi:10.1515/ijsl.2002.014.
• Wilhelm, Cornelia (2002). "Nazi propaganda and the uses of the past: Heinz Kloss and the making of a German America". Amerikastudien / American Studies. 47 (1): 55–83. JSTOR 41157702.