Bloomfield, Leonard

Leonard Bloomfield, (born April 1, 1887, Chicago, Ill., U.S.—died April 18, 1949, New Haven, Conn.), American linguist whose book Language (1933) was one of the most important general treatments of linguistic science in the first half of the 20th century and almost alone determined the subsequent course of linguistics in the United States.

Bloomfield was educated at Harvard University and the universities of Wisconsin and Chicago. He taught from 1909 to 1927 at several universities before becoming professor of Germanic philology at the University of Chicago (1927–40) and professor of linguistics at Yale University (1940–49).

Concerned at first with the details of Indo-European—particularly Germanic—speech sounds and word formation, Bloomfield turned to larger, more general, and wider ranging considerations of language science in An Introduction to the Study of Language (1914). He then pioneered a work on one of the Malayo-Polynesian (Austronesian) languages, Tagalog. In the early 1920s he began his classic work on North American Indian languages, contributing the first of many descriptive and comparative studies of the Algonquian family.

In the writing of Language, Bloomfield claimed that linguistic phenomena could properly and successfully be studied when isolated from their nonlinguistic environment. Adhering to behaviourist principles, he avoided all but empirical description.