Uriel Weinreich (Yiddish: אוריאל ווײַנרײַך; 1926 – 30 March 1967) was a linguist at Columbia University. Born in Vilnius (then part of Poland and now capital of Lithuania), he earned his Ph.D. from Columbia, and went on to teach there, specializing in Yiddish studies, sociolinguistics, and dialectology. He advocated the increased acceptance of semantics, and edited one of the most influential Yiddish-English dictionaries.
Weinreich was the son of the linguist Max Weinreich, and the mentor of both Marvin Herzog, with whom he laid the groundwork for the Language and Cultural Atlas of Ashkenazic Jewry (LCAAJ), and William Labov. Weinreich is also credited with being the first linguist to recognize the phenomenon of interlanguage 19 years before Larry Selinker coined the term in his 1972 article "Interlanguage". In his benchmark book Languages in Contact, Weinreich first noted that learners of second languages consider linguistic forms from their first language equal to forms in the target language. However, the essential inequality of these forms leads to speech which the native speakers of the target language consider unequal. He died of cancer prior to the publication of his Yiddish-English dictionary.
In a tribute by Dovid Katz, "Though he lived less than forty-one years, Uriel Weinreich ... managed to facilitate the teaching of Yiddish language at American universities, build a new Yiddish language atlas, and demonstrate the importance of Yiddish for the science of linguistics."[1]
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