Emeritus Faculty
Lawrence Kaplan
Professor EmeritusLinguistics
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
Professor EmeritusAlaska 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
Professor EmeritusAlaska 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
Professor EmeritusAlaska 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.