Hugo Pipping

Knut Hugo Pipping (5 November 1864 – 31 July 1944) was a Finland Swede linguist who introduced experimental acoustic phonetics to the Nordic countries and later held the chair of Nordic philology at the University of Helsinki from 1908 until his retirement in 1932. A trained phonetician who turned in mid-career to philology, he is remembered both for very early instrumental work on the acoustic properties of vowels and for studies in the language history of Old Gutnish and Old Swedish.

The work was favourably received in both Germany and the Nordic countries, and in 1891 Pipping was appointed docent of phonetics at the University of Helsinki — the first such appointment at any Nordic university.

A short article from 1893 on the educated pronunciation of Swedish in Finland is generally regarded as the earliest scientific description of Finland-Swedish.

Later years and death Pipping withdrew gradually from academic life from the late 1920s onwards. The European crisis of the 1930s and the Second World War weighed heavily on him, although he maintained personal contacts with German colleagues despite his stated dislike of the Nazi regime. After his Helsinki home was severely damaged in an air raid he was taken in by friends. He died in Turku on 31 July 1944.