R B Le Page: obit

[Oladipo Salami]

I met him twice or so while doing a DPhil at Sussex.
The book "Acts of Identity" (together with Milroy's 
Social Networks ) provided me a good theoretical
background for my 1987 thesis at Sussex. May his
gentle sould rest in perfect peace.
Dipo Salami,
Department of English
Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, NIGERIA.
--- Anthea Fraser Gupta <A.F.Gupta at leeds.ac.uk> wrote:

> [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
> 
> 
> *     *     *     *     *
> 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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