Bill Bright Memorial Award Created
We are saddened to report the passing of Bill Bright, a long-time colleague and prolific scholar. Bill's wife, linguist Lise Menn, has requested that memorial contributions be made to the Endangered Language Fund. We have created a fund that will enable the creation of the Bill Bright Award. This will help memorialize his many years of contributions to linguistics, and of his service to the profession as editor of Language, 1966-87, Language in Society, 1992-99, the first edition of the International Encyclopedia of Linguistics, and founding editor of Written Language and Literacy, 1998-2003. From among the annual applications to the Endangered Language Fund's grant program, one successful project from those dealing with languages in the Americas or in South Asia will be selected. This will be the project that best combines Bill's areal interests--North and Central America, South Asia--with his topic interests:
- language description
- language and culture
- sociolinguistics
- writing systems
- creating culturally-acceptable orthographies for minority languages
- differences between written and oral language
- oral literatures and their poetics
- onomastics, toponyms and naming in general
The Bill Bright project will receive a separate press release and an additional amount of money equal to 10% of the proposed budget. We hope that this supplement will allow for additional efforts to promote the work in the native speaker communities and with the general public.
Please help us honor Bill's memory by sending a contribution to:
Please make a note that this is in honor of Bill so that the funds can be ear-marked for this award.
Online donations can be made here:
Please put "Bill Bright Fund" in the Designation area.