Emeritus Faculty

Lawrence Kaplan

Lawrence Kaplan

Professor Emeritus
Linguistics

ldkaplan@alaska.edu | 907-474-6582

Brooks 306E


Lawrence Kaplan is professor emeritus of Linguistics and director of the Alaska Native Language Center from 2000 to 2018. He has taught courses in Linguistics, such as Introduction to Phonetics and Phonology, Historical Linguistics, and Language Policy and Planning, and also works as a linguist with the Inupiaq Eskimo language, which is spoken in northern Alaska.

Kaplan is compiling dictionaries of Inupiaq as well as working on texts and grammatical explanations for the language. He is also involved with training Inupiaq language and culture instructors and works with programs in Native Language Education that offer degrees intended to prepare Native language teachers from Alaska and Yukon Territory in Canada.


James Kari

James Kari

Professor Emeritus
Alaska Native Languages

jmkari@alaska.edu

James Kari retired from ANLC in 1997 but continues to work on several Alaska Native language projects. In the past thirty-five years he has done extensive linguistic work in many Athabascan languages, including Ahtna, Dena'ina, Koyukon, Deg Hit'an, Holikachuk, Tanana, and Upper Tanana.


Jeff Leer

Jeff Leer

Professor Emeritus
Alaska Native Languages

jeffleer@gmail.com

Jeff Leer's commitment to Alaska Native languages began at age seven when he started to study Tlingit in his hometown, Juneau. In 1973 he became a linguist and teacher at ANLC, and in 1991 he completed his Ph.D. dissertation, The Schetic Categories of the Tlingit Verb, at the University of Chicago. He learned to speak both Tlingit and Alutiiq, and he has done extensive linguistic work in other languages, as well as in the field of comparative Athabascan-Eyak-Tlingit.

 

Steve Jacobson

Steve Jacobson

Professor Emeritus
Alaska Native Languages

sajacobson@alaska.edu

Born, raised and educated in Berkeley, California, Steven A. Jacobson earned his bachelor's and master's degrees in mathematics at the University of California. Later, he studied Central Yup'ik Eskimo with the late Irene Reed at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks, and learned much from his wife, Anna, a native speaker, and a writer of the language. Jacobson extended his studies to include Siberian and Naukan Yupik, and comparative Eskimo, with interests in the lexicon, grammar, dialectology, and literature of these languages. He taught university classes in Central Yup'ik for many years, and occasionally in Siberian Yupik, and is the author, co-author, compiler, or editor of a number of dictionaries, grammars, and other studies of the languages.