Henry and Renée Kahane

“He would throw me out the door and I would come back through the window,” said Henry Kahane when reminiscing on how he created the Linguistics Department at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (Brachu, 2005, p. 242). Born in Germany in 1902, he formed one half of the linguistic super team that arrived on campus in 1941. The other half was his wife and fellow linguist, Renée, who was born in Greece in 1907. They met each other at Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany when they both were students. Soon they married and began a joint career studying the Romance languages, specifically their dialects and their changes over time. 

Henry and Renée Kahane immigrated to the United States in 1939 at the start of World War II. They came to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign two years later in 1941 where they joined the Department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese. While they had published other works individually, they published their first work together entitled The Augmentative Feminine in the Romance Languages in 1949.

After years of lobbying the dean and other university administration officials by the Kahanes and their colleagues, the Department of Linguistics was founded in 1965. The department has gone on to contribute  many innovations and become a world leader in the field of linguistics. 

Henry and Renée continued to research, teach and publish their work in the coming decades. The couple were often seen going in and out of room 427 in the Main Library where they conducted much of their award-winning research. They worked with regularity and enthusiasm that other researchers said they envied. 

Working as a team helped to bring unique perspectives and new areas of research. Henry had a strong background in romance languages while Renée’s focus was more in the Byzantine and Hellenistic languages. They traced the history and evolution of words through these two spheres in ways that had not been done before. Their collaboration also allowed their work to reflect two different approaches to linguistics. Henry adopted the more American approach which focused on structuralism, while Renée kept the approach they learned in Europe that focused on dialectology. The unique blending of these two methods helped to show a more complete picture of the languages and words they studied. 

The passion they have for their work was also carried into the classroom with Henry once saying in his later years “For me, still today, the classroom is a theatre, the teacher’s desk the stage, and the teacher himself the performer (Brachu, 2005, p. 239).” Even after their retirement they continued to be active in their research until Henry’s death in 1992 and Renée’s in 2002. In all they published over one hundred works together.