Aert H. Kuipers

Aert Hendrik Kuipers (10 November 1919, Oostkapelle or Middelburg^[1] – 1 December 2012)^[2] was a Dutch linguist who, from his pioneering fieldwork among First Nations people of British Columbia during the 1950s, compiled the first detailed reference grammars of Squamish and Shuswap, two almost extinct Salishan languages. He also advised Jan van Eijk in his work on Lillooet and Hank Nater in his work on Nuxalk and did important work on comparative Salishan.

After obtaining his PhD at Columbia University in 1951 with the study A contribution to the analysis of the Qabardian language,^[1] Kuipers was on the faculty of the University of British Columbia from 1951 to 1954. During those years, as well as in the course of a 1956 field trip, he collected extensive material on the Squamish language. From 1960 to 1983, he taught linguistics at Leiden University. After 1971, he was a professor^[ambiguous] in the department of Slavic languages and culture, specializing in Caucasian languages.^[3]

Kuipers had a strong commitment to helping to preserve a record of threatened and endangered languages. As a 1998 article in The Economist put it, "Aert Kuipers ... went to Canada recently with the intention of locating and preserving American Indian languages. He came across dozens, some limited to a single valley, others spoken by only a few dozen people. He settled on one, learnt it and put together a dictionary and a primer. But by the time he had finished there was only one other speaker of the language left."^[4] Kuipers responded to this in a letter that his arrival in Canada (nearly half a century earlier) was hardly "recently" and that The Economist may have conflated Squamish and Shuswap with regard to the "one speaker left" statement.^[5]