Wolfgang Klein (linguist)

Wolfgang Klein (born February 3, 1946) is a German linguist and a founding director of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. He's known for his contributions in language acquisition, text analysis and studies on the semantics of time and space.

Education and career
Klein was born in Spiesen of Saarland. He attended elementary school there from 1952 to 1956 and the secondary school in Sulzbach from 1956 to 1965. Klein then studied German, Romance languages and philosophy at the Saarland University, where he received his doctorate in 1970. He then continued research at the Saarland University before moving to Heidelberg. After his habilitation in 1972 at the University of Heidelberg, he became an academic advisor and then a full professor at the same place from 1972 to 1976. From 1976 to 1980, Klein was a professor at the University of Frankfurt am Main. During this time, Klein also worked with Willem Levelt starting from 1977. In 1980, Willem Levelt and Klein co-founded the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen and Klein became the director of the language acquisition department. He retired from the institute in 2015.

Klein also headed the Language Archive, which was established in 2010 at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics and documents endangered languages with funding from the Volkswagen Foundation. Klein writes regularly in the Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik (Journal for Literary Studies and Linguistics), which he co-founded in 1970.

Honors and awards
In 1994, Klein became a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, where he heads the Digital Dictionary of the German Language. In 1996, Klein received the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize from the German Research Foundation. In 2009, he became a member of the German Academy for Language and Poetry, where he was Vice President from 2014 till 2020. In 2018, Klein was awarded the Wilhelm von Humboldt prize for linguistics.