We are saddened to pass on the news that Harold (“Hal”) Schiffman, for many years a professor of Tamil in the UW’s Department of Asian Languages and Literature, died on December 14, 2022, at his home in Haddonfield, New Jersey. He was 84 years old at the time of his passing. Hal was born in Buffalo, New York in 1938. He earned his B.A. (in German and French) from Antioch College and his M.A. (in Slavic and Dravidian Linguistics) and Ph.D. (in Dravidian Linguistics) from the University of Chicago, where his teachers included A. K. Ramanujan and James McCawley. After a brief stint at U.C. Davis, Hal came to the University of Washington in 1967, where he remained until 1995, when he accepted a position at the University of Pennsylvania.
While at the University of Washington, in addition to teaching a variety of courses in Tamil language, linguistics, and culture, Hal served in several instructional and administrative capacities. He was an adjunct faculty member in Linguistics and Anthropology. He served as Chair of Asian L&L from 1982 to 1987 and Director of the Language Center from 1994 to 1995. Hal was an internationally renowned scholar not only of Dravidian linguistics, but of language policy and language maintenance. He wrote grammars, reference materials, and linguistic studies of Tamil, Kannada, and the Dravidian language family. He had many publications on the sociolinguistics of South Asia. His studies of Tamil diglossia were well-known and respected. And his book, Linguistic Culture and Language Policy (1996) was a major and widely recognized contribution to the field of language politics. Hal was a dedicated and caring teacher, as well as a generous and thoughtful colleague and administrator. He will be greatly missed. Hal is survived by his wife Marilyn and son Tim.