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R.B. Le Page
Bob Le Page (1920-2006) was a founding father of sociolinguistics. Growing up in the east of London in the 1920s, and after a perilous WW2 flying against U-boats, he worked his way through Oxford t...view moreBob Le Page (1920-2006) was a founding father of sociolinguistics. Growing up in the east of London in the 1920s, and after a perilous WW2 flying against U-boats, he worked his way through Oxford to become a young lecturer in English at the new University College of the West Indies in the early 1950s. There - based on his observation of multilingual Caribbean societies - began the slow foment of his view of language as not some theoretical construct of "deep rules" and idealised speakers (as many linguists studied) but as the complex "acts of identity" of real people in their difficult daily lives.
After Jamaica he moved to a professorhip in Malaya, and then founded the first British school of sociolinguistics at York University, as well as teaching in the USA, Singapore, Norway and elsewhere, and a longterm collaboration with A.Tabouret-Keller in Strasbourg. His longstanding involvement with creole language communities led him to a profoundly humane and sympathetic view of language behaviour which has grown steadily in influence over the years.view less