Author: William Mandeville Austin
Alternate names: AUSTIN W. M.
Born: 31 Jan. 1914
Died: 24 Sept. 1971
Bio: **William Mandeville AUSTIN Jr. (1914-1971)** was an American professor whose research focuses on the language by its cultural meanings and practices, a resource for the study of societies. W. M. Austin directed the series of Spoken Language Dictionaries and inaugurated, at Illinois Tech, a new doctoral program in linguistics. 

***Early life and education***. W. M. Austin (“Bill”) born in Philadelphia, Jan. 31,1914, was the son of William Mandeville Austin (1886-1925) engaged in the rise of educational phonograph culture through the Student Educational Records Inc. He grew up at Lakewood N.J. and was Stinnecke Scholar in classics at Princeton. In 1938, he received his Ph.D. from Princeton were he explored  links between the disciplines of linguistics, anthropology and mathematics with the help of class friends: Henry Lee Smith, René Puech, Jean Marie Delfosse and Robert Hofstadter. He later joined a serious concern with mathematics and research in machine translation.

***Career.*** Since his Sterling Fellowship at Minnesota, W. M. Austin taught in Yale, NYU, Johns Hopkins, Georgetown, Temple, and, finally, Illinois Institute of Technology. He was during the war, with Henry Lee Smith (“Haxie”) and Raven I. McDavid, in the language section, Information and Education Division of the US Army were he developed the Army method of language instruction with the use of phonograph records. 
Austin was member of the Linguistic Society of America, the Institute of Languages and Linguistics and, finally in 1971, was a cofoundater of the History of American Linguistics.

***Pierre-François PUECH and Bernard PUECH***

References: 
-1 McDavid Raven I. Jr. 1972 “William M. Austin 1914-1971” Journal of the American Oriental Society. 92,1: 196. DOI: 10.2307/599722
-2 McDavid Raven I. Jr.  1980. Linguistics, through the Kitchen Door,in “First Person Singular: Papers from the Conference on an Oral Archive for the History of American Linguistics”, Davis B.H. and O’Cain R.K. eds. University of South-Carolina, Columbia S.C., John Benjamines Publishing Company, Amsterdam.
-3 Princeton Alumni Weekly 1971, Dec. 14, page 19.