Alf Sommerfelt (November 23, 1892 – October 12, 1965), was aNorwegianlinguist and the first professor oflinguistics in Norway, working at theUniversity of Oslo from 1931 to 1962.
Sommerfelt was born inTrondheim, Norway. He married theyoung adult literature writerAimée Sommerfelt. He died in Nes, Norway, aged 72.
Sommerfelt was a central figure in the introduction ofstructuralism in Norway. He had studied inParis, and held lectures onSaussure,glossematics, thePrague school andAmerican structuralism. People at the Nordic institutes, on the other hand, didn't subscribe to Sommerfelt's methods, and there was little contact between them and the structuralists until the 1960s.
Together with the SlavicistOlaf Broch, Sommerfelt founded theNorwegian association for linguistics in 1924, an association that would play an important part in the introduction of new linguistic theories to Norway.
Sommerfelt wrote several popular introductions to linguistics. He also wrote an introductory book on general linguistics (1947), a book read by all the linguistics students at the university of Oslo, and reprinted ten years later. Sommerfelt was also one of the editors ofNorsk riksmålsordbog (the NorwegianRiksmål dictionary).
