Victor Golla | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1939 Santa Rosa, California, U.S. |
| Died | 2021 (aged 81–82) Trinidad, California, U.S. |
| Occupation | Linguist |
| Spouse | Ellen Golla |
| Academic background | |
| Alma mater | University of California, Berkeley |
| Academic work | |
| Main interests | Indigenous languages of California and Oregon |
| Notable works | California Indian Languages (2011) |
Victor Golla (1939–2021) was a linguist who specialized in the indigenous languages of California and Oregon, especially thePacific Coast Athabaskan subgroup of theAthabaskan language family and the languages of the region that belong to thePenutian phylum. He was emeritus professor of anthropology atHumboldt State University and lived inTrinidad, California.
Golla was born inSanta Rosa, California, and grew up in the small town ofMt. Shasta, in the far north of the state, where his father was afuneral director and deputy coroner ofSiskiyou County. The family moved to the San Francisco Bay area in 1952, and Golla attended high school inOakland. He graduated fromUC Berkeley in 1960 and received his Ph.D. in linguistics from the same institution in 1970.
Golla taught briefly at theUniversity of Alberta (assistant professor of linguistics, 1966–1967) andColumbia University (instructor in anthropology, 1967–1968), and then settled in Washington, D.C. for two decades, teaching in the anthropology department atGeorge Washington University (1968–1988) and conducting research on the extensive archival documentation of American Indian languages that is housed in theNational Anthropological Archives at theSmithsonian Institution. In 1988, he was invited to join the faculty ofHumboldt State University, inArcata, California, as professor of Native American Studies and director of the Center for Indian Community Development.
In 1981 Golla helped found theSociety for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas (SSILA), and subsequently served for 25 years as the Society's secretary-treasurer and editor of its quarterlySSILA Newsletter (1982 to 2007). SSILA established the Victor Golla Prize in his honor, to recognize Americanist linguists who show "a significant history of both linguistic scholarship and service to the scholarly community".[1]
In addition to his work at Humboldt, Golla held a series of visiting appointments atUC Davis (professor of anthropology 1996–1997; research associate in anthropology, 1997–2006), and from 2001 co-principal investigator of the J. P. Harrington Database Project. He also served as a linguistic consultant to theHoopa Valley Tribe, where he was responsible for creating the Hupa Practical Alphabet and a number of pedagogical and reference materials, including an English-Hupa bilingual dictionary (1996a).
He was the author of several scholarly books and numerous articles on American Indian languages, including three grammars of Hupa (1970, 1986a, 1996b) and a 1000-page compendium of the Hupa lexical and grammatical materials collected in 1927 by Edward Sapir (Sapir & Golla 2001). His last major publication,California Indian Languages (2011),[2] was awarded the 2013Leonard Bloomfield Book Award by theLinguistic Society of America for being the recently published book "which makes the most outstanding contribution to the development of our understanding of language and linguistics".[3]
In 2015 Golla was named a Fellow of theAmerican Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). In selecting Golla, the society cited his "influential research on Native American linguistics and ethnography" and his "outstanding service to the profession."[4]
Golla died at his home inTrinidad, California, in April 2021 of advancedParkinson's disease and a stroke.
