Kenneth L. Hale

Kenneth Locke Hale (August 15, 1934 – October 8, 2001) was a linguist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who studied a huge variety of previously unstudied and often endangered languages—especially indigenous languages of North America, Central America and Australia. Languages investigated by Hale include Navajo, O'odham, Warlpiri, and Ulwa, among many others.

Life

Hale was born in Evanston, Illinois. When he was six his family moved to a ranch near Canelo in southern Arizona. He was a student at the University of Arizona from 1952 and obtained his PhD from Indiana University Bloomington in 1959 (thesis A Papago grammar). He taught at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1961-63 and at the University of Arizona, Tucson in 1963-66. From 1967 he held a sequence of appointments at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology until his retirement in 1999.

Hale was known as a polyglot who retained the ability to learn new languages with extraordinary rapidity and perfection throughout his life. As a child in addition to English he learned both Spanish and Tohono O'odham. He learned Jemez and Hopi from his high school roommates and Navajo from his roommate at the University of Arizona. He became so fluent in Warlpiri that he raised his sons Ezra and Caleb to speak Warlpiri after his return from Australia to the United States. Ezra delivered his eulogy for his father in Warlpiri.