Mary Haas

Career and research

Early work in linguistics Haas undertook graduate work on comparative philology at the University of Chicago. She studied under Edward Sapir, whom she later followed to Yale. She began a long career in linguistic fieldwork by studying various languages during the summer months.

Shortly after, Haas conducted fieldwork with Watt Sam and Nancy Raven, the last two native speakers of the Natchez language in Oklahoma. Her extensive unpublished field notes have constituted the most reliable source of information on the now dead language. She conducted extensive fieldwork on the Muskogee language, and was the first modern linguist to collect extensive texts in the language. Her Muskogee texts were published after her death in a volume that was edited and translated by Jack B. Martin, Margaret McKane Mauldin, and Juanita McGirt.

Career at the University of California, Berkeley During World War II, the United States government viewed the study and teaching of Southeast Asian languages as important to the war effort, and under the auspices of the Army Specialized Training Program at the University of California at Berkeley, Haas developed a program to teach the Thai language. Her authoritative Thai-English Students' Dictionary, published in 1964, is still in use.

In 1948, she was appointed assistant professor of Thai and Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley Department of Oriental Languages, an appointment she attributed to Peter A. Boodberg, whom she described as "ahead of his time in the way he treated women scholars—a scholar was a scholar in his book". She retired from Berkeley in 1977 and in 1984 was elected a Berkeley Fellow.

Mary Haas died at her home in Berkeley, California, on May 17, 1996, at the age of 86. that she trained more Americanist linguists than her former instructors Edward Sapir and Franz Boas combined: she supervised fieldwork in Americanist linguistics by more than 100 doctoral students. As a founder and director of the Survey of California Indian Languages, she advised nearly fifty dissertations, including those of many linguists who were later influential in the field, including William Bright (Karok), William Shipley (Maidu), Robert Oswalt (Kashaya), Karl Teeter (Wiyot), Catherine Callaghan (Penutian), Margaret Langdon (Diegueño), Sally McLendon (Eastern Pomo), Victor Golla (Hupa), Wick Miller (Acoma), Marc Okrand (Mutsun), Kenneth Whistler (Proto-Wintun), Douglas Parks (Pawnee and Arikara), and William Jacobsen (Washo).

Awards and honors In 1963, Haas served as president of the Linguistic Society of America. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1964. She was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1974, and she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1978. She received honorary doctorates from Northwestern University in 1975, the University of Chicago in 1976, Earlham College, 1980, and the Ohio State University in 1980. Spoken Thai, 1945 [co-authored with Heng R. Subhanka]. Linguistic Society of America. Thai reader, 1945, Berkeley. Tunica texts, 1950. University of California publications in linguistics, 6.1. Berkeley: University of California Press. 173pp. Thai vocabulary, 1955. American Council of Learned Societies. The prehistory of languages, 1960. Mouton. [Reprint 2018] Thai-English student's dictionary, 1964. Stanford University Press. Language, culture, and history : essays, 1978. Stanford University Press. Creek (Muskogee) texts, 2015. [co-authored with James H. Hill]. University of California Press.