Brent Galloway

Brent Douglas Galloway (8 April 1944 – 6 August 2014) is an American linguist noted for his work with endangered Amerindian languages.

Galloway was born in Oakland, California and received his B.A., C.Phil., and Ph.D. in linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley in 1965, 1971, and 1977, respectively. He has done linguistic field work with the Haisla language, Upriver Halkomelem (from 1970), Nooksack (from 1974), the Samish dialect of Northern Straits Salish (from 1984), and Gullah (from 1994). In the case of Nooksack and Samish, he worked with the last surviving fluent speakers known then (one speaker has become a fluent speaker of Nooksack since 2002, and there may be 3 or 4 descendants who speak Samish).

From 1975 and 1980 he founded and headed the Halkomelem Language Program at the Coqualeetza Education Training Centre in Sardis, British Columbia. He there developed the Stó:lō Halkomelem orthography which was subsequently adopted officially and is now in wide use throughout the Fraser Valley. He also compiled the first grammar of Upriver Halkomelem, published in 1977, plus treatises on the region's ethnobotany and ethnozoology. According to Galloway, some words in Halkomelem "encapsulate the whole knowledge of the culture." The language has a rich oral literature which shows a whole way of looking at the universe that is different from that of English or other European languages.

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