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With one lip, with two lips , A metaphorical couplet from classical Nahuatl oratory, signifying "indirectly poetic speech"; also the title of William Bright's Linguistic Society of America presidential address (Language , 1990)
William Bright, friend and colleague, died on October 15, 2006, near Boulder, Colorado. Bill received his Ph.D. in linguistics from Berkeley in 1955. He taught linguistics and anthropology at UCLA for 29 years until his retirement in 1988. Up to the time of his death he was adjunct Professor at the University of Colorado. He wrote more than 200 books, articles, and reviews, of relevance to many disciplines, including linguistics, anthropology, literature, psychology, and sociology. He was the editor of Language , the journal of the Linguistic Society of America, from 1965 to 1987. He was a leading figure in the field of sociolinguistics, and he edited Language in Society from 1993 to 1999.
Bill's research dealt with North American indigenous languages, especially languages of California, and in particular Karuk; Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs; Cakchiquel Mayan; and Dravidian languages of India. It included such endeavors as grammatical description; dictionary making; historical linguistics, including areal-typological approaches; sociolinguistics and language and culture; ethnopoetics; writing systems; and onomastics. He was extremely committed to the study of endangered languages and literatures. A festschrift for Bill, The life of language: Papers in linguistics in honor of William Bright , edited by three of his students (Hill, Mistry, and Campbell,1997; Mouton de Gruyter) demonstrates the range and variety of his interests as well as the many people he has influenced.
A full assessment of Bill's scholarship and publications will appear elsewhere. Much of his work was dedicated to editing. Since he was editor of Language in Society and since I collaborated in several of his editorships and have been in touch with people who collaborated with him in other editing projects, I will focus on this important aspect of his career.
In addition to editing two major journals, Language and Language in Society , Bill was also the founding editor of Written Language and Literacy (1998-2003) and the editor of the books Studies in California Linguistics (1964), Sociolinguistics: Proceedings (1966), Coyote stories (1978), The collected works of Edward Sapir , American Indian languages, volume 5,...