From the New York Times:

Edward S. Klima (left), an eminent linguist who was one of the first scholars to pay serious attention to sign languages, and in so doing helped them win long-denied recognition as languages in their own right, died on Sept. 25 in the La Jolla section of San Diego.

… At his death, Dr. Klima was emeritus professor of linguistics at the University of California, San Diego. He was also an adjunct professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in San Diego and the associate director of the institute’s laboratory for cognitive neuroscience.

Much of Dr. Klima’s work was done in collaboration with his wife, Ursula Bellugi, a professor at Salk and the laboratory’s longtime director. They were known in particular for their long, painstaking unraveling of the grammatical structure of American Sign Language, and for using what they found to illuminate the workings of all language, signed and spoken, in the brain.

… Their work is widely credited with helping American Sign Language gain broader acceptance as a language of instruction for deaf people and, by extension, with helping kindle the Deaf Pride movement, which began in the late 1980s.

(University of California photo from the New York Times)

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