[5] After graduating from high school, Lehmann studied German and classical philology at Northwestern College, where he received his BA in humanities in 1936.

[7] Among his teachers at the University of Wisconsin were the Indo-Europeanist and Balticist Alfred E. Senn, Celticist Myles Dillon, Scandinavist Einar Haugen, and Morris Swadesh, William Freeman Twaddell and Roe-Merrill S. Heffner.

He spent much time working with Heffner on phonetics, and the two co-wrote several articles on dialectology and sociophonetics for the journal American Speech, which are still of importance to scholars today.

[12] Scholars hired by him during this time include Emmon Bach, Robert T. Harms, Edgar C. Polomé and Werner Winter.

Instead of only grading his students' papers and exams, he would give them detailed evaluations of their performance, and encouraged them to pursue and develop ideas.

[12] Under the leadership of Lehmann, the departments for Germanic languages and linguistics at University of Texas at Austin both became among the top five graduate programs in North America, which they remained for 25 years.

[13] Almost ten percent of all PhDs awarded in linguistics in the United States during this time came from the University of Texas at Austin.

[11] He supervised more than fifty PhDs and mentored hundreds of students, many of whom would acquire prominent positions in their respective fields.

[1] Studies in Descriptive and Historical Linguistics, a festschrift in Lehmann's honor, was published in 1977 under the editorship of Paul Hopper.

[4] He received the Harry H. Ransom Award for Teaching Excellence in the Liberal Arts in 1983, which he would describe as the greatest honor of his career.

[14] In 1984, together with fellow researcher Jonathan Slocum, Lehmann developed a groundbreaking prototype computer program for language translation, which the LRC put into commercial production for Siemens.

[2] Language Change and Typological Variation, a second festschrift in his honor, was published by the Institute for the Study of Man in 1999 under the editorship of Edgar C. Polomé and Carol F.

[12] Lehmann was preceded in death by his wife Ruth and his son Terry, and died in Austin, Texas on August 1, 2007.

[15] His contributions to the fields of Indo-European, Germanic and historical linguistics, and machine translation, have been significant, and several of his works on these subjects have remained standard texts up to the present day.

He is remembered for his crucial role in establishing the University of Texas at Austin as one of America's leading institutions in linguistics, and for the large numbers of students that he taught and mentored, many of whom have made major contributions to scholarship.

They donated 160 acres (0.65 km2) of land in the northwest of Travis County, Texas to The Nature Conservancy to create the Ruth Lehmann Memorial Tract.