It is with a very very heavy heart that we must share with you the news that our esteemed colleague and friend Wolfgang "Wolf" Wölck passed away. Wolf's dedication to the department and students was exemplary. We invite students and colleagues to share their memories of Wolf. To post or view comments please click here.
Wolfgang Hans-Joachim “Wolf” Wölck was born September 19, 1932, in Königsberg, East Prussia (now Kaliningrad, Russia). He received a Ph.D. from Goethe University Frankfurt in English and Linguistics in 1963. He held appointments at Albert Ludwig University Freiburg, 1964-1965, and Indiana University Bloomington, 1966-1969, before joining the Linguistics Department at the University at Buffalo as an Associate Professor in 1970. (The department had been founded a year earlier after a gestation period of 13 years as a program within UB’s Anthropology Department.) He was promoted to Full Professor in 1975 and SUNY Distinguished Service Professor in 1997. He chaired the UB Linguistics Department from 1977 through 1987 and again from 1989 through 1991. He also served as Director of UB’s Latin American Studies Program from 1972 through 1976.
Wölck was a pioneering sociolinguist with a specialization in contact linguistics. His career is associated with a series of landmark innovations in the field. His dissertation examined the sociophonetics of the Scots dialect of Buchan, Aberdeenshire (Wölck 1965), based on field research carried out in the beginning of the 1960s, at 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 (Wölck 1976). In Buffalo, Wölck discovered 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 1981, 2002). From 1968 through 1996, he led a longitudinal survey of Quechua-Spanish bilingualism funded by the Peruvian government, which resulted in policy recommendations for the standardization of Peruvian Quechua – the language received official status in 1975 – and in a short grammar (Wölck 1987). And together with his collaborator Peter Nelde, 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.
Professor Wölck officially retired from the University at Buffalo in 2001, but continued teaching and advising until 2012, generously donating his salary to the UB Linguistics Department. He is survived by his spouse of nearly 60 years, Carolyn Ann Wölck née Burch.
References
Wölck, W. (1965). Phonematische Analyse der Sprache von Buchan [Phonemic analysis of the language of Buchan]. Heidelberg: Carl Winter.
---- (1976). Community Profiles: An alternative to linguistic informant selection. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 9:43-47 (reprinted in Linguistics 17(7)).
---- (1987). Pequeño Breviario Quechua. Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos.
---- (2002). Ethnolects – between bilingualism and urban dialect. In Li Wei et al. eds., Opportunities and challenges of bilingualism: Contribution to the Sociology of Language 87. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 157-170.
Wölck, W. & E. K. Carlock. (1981). A method for isolating diagnostic linguistic variables: The Buffalo ethnolects experiment. In H. Cedergren & D. H. Sankoff (eds.), Variation omnibus. Papers in English and French from the Eighth Colloquium on New Ways of Analyzing Variation in English (NWAVE) held in Montréal, Québec, Canada, 1980. Carbondale, IL: Linguistic Research. 17-24.