R B Le Page: obit

[Anthea Fraser Gupta]

[I have sent a slightly different version of this the THE LINGUIST LIST]

This is to let you know that R B Le Page died on Friday 13 January 2006.
Bob was a pioneer of modern creole studies and of what would later
become the study of English as a world language. It was Jamaica that
made him a linguist. His *Jamaican Creole : an historical introduction
to Jamaican Creole*, which was published in 1960, was to be the basis of
much later work in the field. The vital *Dictionary of Jamaican English*
(Cassidy & Le Page) came out in 1967. By the 1980s he had developed the
'Acts of Identity' theory (see especially Le Page & Tabouret-Keller
1985) which provides theoretical underpinning for much recent
sociolinguistic work dealing with communities of practice, inter alia.

He has left his legacy too in the form of those of us who were his
students in the universities where he taught, especially West Indies,
Malaya, and York, but also in places where he taught as a visitor,
including Singapore. He founded an outstanding and innovative department
of linguistics at York when the university was created in 1963, and
shaped that department until his retirement in 1988.

He was also an early scholar of language policy, especially in his
consideration of an orthography for what he called Jamaican Creole, and
in his work on national languages and on native languages.

More on R B Le Page:
http://www.scl-online.net/rblepage.html


Anthea


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Anthea Fraser Gupta (Dr)
School of English, University of Leeds, LS2 9JT
<www.leeds.ac.uk/english/staff/afg>
NB: Reply to a.f.gupta at leeds.ac.uk
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