Henri Wittmann

Henri Wittmann (born 1937) is a Canadian linguist from Quebec. He is best known for his work on Quebec French.

Biography Henri (Hirsch) Wittmann was born in Alsace in 1937. After studying with André Martinet at the Sorbonne, he moved to North America and taught successively at the University of Colorado at Boulder, the University of Alberta in Edmonton, the University of Windsor and McGill University in Montreal before teaching in the French university system of Quebec, the Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières and at Rimouski as well as the Université de Sherbrooke. He retired from teaching in 1997, after an extensive tour of teaching and conferencing in France. In the following years, he became the first Director of the Presses universitaires de Trois-Rivières and emeritus researcher at the Centre d’Analyse des Littératures Francophones des Amériques (CALIFA) at Carleton University in Ottawa.

As a comparatist, Wittmann contributed to the study of the morphology of a number of languages and language families: Pre-Indo-European, Indo-European (Hittite, Italic, Romance, Germanic, Creole), Afro-Asiatic (Egyptian), African (Mande, Kwa, Bantu), Austronesian (Malagasy, Polynesian), Amerindian (Arawakan, Cariban). His work between 1963 and 2002 includes more than 140 items.

He is a life member since 1962 of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA). In 1965, he cofounded with André Rigault and Douglas Ellis the Linguistics Department at McGill University. In 1981, he was the cofounder, with Normand Beauchemin and Robert Fournier, of the Linguistic Society of Quebec (Association québécoise de linguistique) which he served for 10 years as president, secretary general and organizer of the annual meeting. In 1981 as well, he became the first Editor of the Revue québécoise de linguistique théorique et appliquée, a responsibility he assumed for the following 20 years.

Politically, Wittmann is known for his anarcho-syndicalist sympathies with strong links to the CNTU (Confederation of National Trade Unions), communautary and anti-war movements. In 1974-1978, he was at the center of a union conflict at the University of Quebec which changed the landscape of collective bargaining in the academic world. A specialist of the linguistic heritage of Quebec, he also is a stout defender of Quebec independence.

Contributions to linguistics Henri Wittmann is the first modern linguist to study non-standard forms of Quebec French (notably Joual, Magoua and Chaouin) in a theory-orientated and comparative framework.

In a general way, Wittmann, a student of André Martinet in the fifties, has been the first to apply the latter's principles of chain reactions in phonology to inflectional morphology. In Wittmann's view, the basic structure of the sentence is held together by functional items, with the lexical items filling in the blanks.