Thomas Edward Dutton (1935–2021)

Abstract

1. PROLOGUE. Thomas (Tom) Edward Dutton died on December 21, 2021, aged eighty-six. He made important contributions to the study of New Guinea languages in several domains. He carried out surveys of the 100 or so indigenous languages of Central and Southeast Papua and did in-depth descriptions of several of these, especially Koiari and Koita. He wrote textbooks for Tok Pisin and Police Motu, the chief lingue franche of Papua New Guinea (PNG). He contributed many maps and articles to the massive twovolume Language Atlas of the Pacific. He was the Foundation Professor of Linguistics at The University of Papua New Guinea (UPNG) from 1975 to 1977. He served as managing editor of Pacific Linguistics (PL) publications between 1987 and 1996. He co-supervised the dissertations of many PhD students who worked on languages of New Guinea.