Kenneth Lee Pike (1912-2000) was an American linguist and anthropologist who was known for his studies of the indigenous languages of Peru, Mexico, Ecuador, Bolivia, New Guinea, Ghana, Java, Nigeria, Australia, Nepal, and the Philippines. He is also the founder of tagmemics – a mode of linguistic analysis.
Pike attended Gordon College, where he received a Bachelor of Arts in 1933. He then joined an organization devoted to studying rare, unwritten languages as an addition to Bible translation work. This organization later evolved into the Summer Institute of Linguistics, and Pike served as its first president from 1942 to 1979. In the 1930s, Pike traveled to Mexico to study the Mixtec language.
The experience was pivotal in his career in linguistics, which began in the same decade. He received a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1942 and later taught there (1948-1977) and served as chairman of the school’s linguistics department in 1975-1977.
Pike’s most influential work – Tagmemics – is an important branch of linguistics that stems from the work of Bloomfield and Pike, and which deals with the immediate constituents of language. Additionally, Pike conducted research in various areas of linguistics, including tagmemics, phonology, and grammar. He is the author of Intonation of American English (1945), co-editor of Tone Systems of Tibeto-Burman Languages of Nepal, Parts I–IV (1970), and co-author of Grammatical Analysis (1977) and Songs of Fun and Faith (1977). Some of his work was published in Selected Writings in 1972.
He garnered a wealth of awards and honorary degrees for his work in advocating for peace, including 16 nominations for the Nobel Peace Prize. He died in 2000 leaving a legacy of translations and research on his name. His work in this area has continued to be influential up to the present day.
