Brent Galloway

Brent D. Galloway (born 1944 in Oakland, California) is an American linguist noted for his work with endangered Amerindian languages.

Galloway received his B.A. and Ph.D. in linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley in 1965 and 1977, respectively, and his C.Phil. at California State University at San Francisco in 1966. He has done linguistic field work with Haisla language, Upriver Halkomelem (from 1970), Nooksack (from 1974), the Samish dialect of Northern Straits Salish (from 1984), and Gullah (from 1994). In the case of Nooksack and Samish, he worked with the last surviving fluent speaker.

From 1975 and 1980 he founded and headed the Halkomelem Language Program at the Coqualeetza Education Training Centre in Sardis, British Columbia. He there developed the Halkomelem orthography which was subsequently adopted officially and is now in wide use throughout the Fraser Valley. He also compiled the first grammar of Upriver Halkomelem, published in 1977, plus treatises on the region's ethnobotany and ethnozoology.

In 1988 he joined the Saskatchewan Indian Federated College's Department of Indian Languages, Literatures, & Linguistics and served as its head from 1988 to 1994. He continues to work extensively with Halkomelem language education and is currently compiling dictionaries for Upriver Halkomelem, Nooksack, and Gullah.

Galloway is also a composer of classical music whose pieces have been performed by the Regina Symphony Orchestra.