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Kenneth Lee PikeAmerican linguist and anthropologist.
Date of Birth: 09.06.1912
Country:  USA |
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Biography of Kenneth Lee Pike
Kenneth Lee Pike was an American linguist and anthropologist. He was known for his work on the tagmemics theory and the terms "emic" and "etic." Pike was a representative of the Ann Arbor School of Descriptive Linguistics and specialized in general phonetics and phonology, general linguistics, and foreign language instruction.
Early Life and Education
Pike was born in Woodstock, Connecticut, USA. He studied theology at Gordon College in Boston and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1933. He initially intended to work as a missionary in China but had to abandon this plan due to health reasons. In 1935, Pike continued his education by studying American Indian languages at the Summer Institute of Linguistics (S.I.L.) at the University of Oklahoma. He also studied the Mixtec language among native speakers in Mexico.
Academic Career
In 1937, Pike enrolled at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where he worked on his doctoral dissertation in linguistics under the guidance of E. Sapir. During his fieldwork, he lived among the Mixtec tribe and, alongside his wife Evelyn, developed a writing system for the Mixtec language. After earning his Ph.D. in 1942, Pike became the president of the Summer Institute of Linguistics. The main goal of the institute was to translate the Bible into unwritten languages, and in 1951, Pike published the Mixtec New Testament Bible.
Pike served as the president of the Summer Institute of Linguistics (S.I.L. International) from 1942 to 1979 and as the honorary president from 1979 until his death in 2000. In addition to his work at S.I.L., Pike worked for 30 years at the University of Michigan as the chair of the Linguistics Department, a linguistics professor, and the director of the English Language Institute. He was one of the pioneers in teaching English as a second language (ESL/ESOL/EFL/ELT). Pike was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the Linguistic Society of America, and the American Anthropological Association. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize for his contributions to linguistics. Pike also received honorary doctorates from several universities.
Contributions and Legacy
Pike's most famous distinction was between "emic" and "etic" linguistic units. He argued that only native speakers could provide reliable judgments on emic aspects, which played a crucial role in providing data for linguistic research. Non-native researchers, on the other hand, applied scientific methods to analyze language, formulating etic aspects that could be tested and reproduced.
Pike conducted fieldwork on understudied languages in Australia, Bolivia, Ecuador, Ghana, Java, Mexico, Nepal, Papua New Guinea, Nigeria, the Philippines, and Peru. He developed the tagmemic theory to facilitate the analysis of languages in Central and South America by identifying sequences of linguistic elements that could perform various functions using semantic and syntactic elements.
As a phonetician, Pike is known for his system of discrete modeling of intonation (intonational levels), which he first proposed for the English language. He also introduced the concepts of "contour" and "register" musical tones. Pike proposed a theory of three types of speech activity units - "particles," "waves," and "fields." He also created an artificial language called "Kalaba-X" for teaching translation theory and practice. Pike also delved into philosophical issues and published a collection of his own poetic works in 1997.
Kenneth Lee Pike passed away on December 31, 2000, in Dallas, Texas. He left behind a lasting legacy in the field of linguistics, contributing significantly to the understanding of language and its cultural context.
