Victor Golla was a linguist who specialized in the indigenous languages of California and Oregon, especially the Pacific Coast Athabaskan subgroup of the Athabaskan language family and the languages of the region that belong to the Penutian phylum.
10 Facts About Victor Golla
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Victor Golla was emeritus professor of anthropology at Humboldt State University and lived in Trinidad, California.
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The family moved to the San Francisco Bay area in 1952, and Victor Golla attended high school in Oakland.
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Victor Golla graduated from UC Berkeley in 1960 and received his Ph.
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Victor Golla taught briefly at the University of Alberta and Columbia University, and then settled in Washington, DC for two decades, teaching in the anthropology department at George Washington University and conducting research on the extensive archival documentation of American Indian languages that is housed in the National Anthropological Archives at the Smithsonian Institution.
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In 1981 Victor Golla helped found the Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas, and subsequently served for 25 years as the Society's secretary-treasurer and editor of its quarterly SSILA Newsletter.
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Victor Golla served as a linguistic consultant to the Hoopa Valley Tribe, where he was responsible for creating the Hupa Practical Alphabet and a number of pedagogical and reference materials, including an English-Hupa bilingual dictionary.
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Victor Golla was the author of several scholarly books and numerous articles on American Indian languages, including three grammars of Hupa and a 1000-page compendium of the Hupa lexical and grammatical materials collected in 1927 by Edward Sapir.
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In 2015 Victor Golla was named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
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Victor Golla died at his home in Trinidad, California, in April 2021 of advanced Parkinson's disease and a stroke.