Jimmy Gene Harris died in Seattle on September 30, 2012, at the age of 82. He led a remarkable life. He was always proud of his hillbilly roots and had an early knack for languages and for understanding cultural differences and human nature in general. He was a soldier of fortune, a champion for human rights, an exacting phonetic fieldworker, a teller of stories, a teacher and a mentor. Raised in the Arkansas Ozarks, he began his international adventures in the US Marine Corps in the Korean War. He returned to the US from Korea as a sergeant and soon went to Japan where he met a young woman from Hiroshima who would become his wife. Hiroko, a survivor of the atomic bomb in 1945, still lives in their home in Seattle and often receives visits from their six children. Jimmy pursued his linguistic education in Mexico City and at the University of Washington, with an MA in 1966 specializing in Japanese and Asian Studies, while also carrying out fundamental language revitalization fieldwork with the Stó:lō Nation (Salish) in the Fraser River Valley of BC. Jimmy then did work for the Peace Corps, first in Bolivia and then moving to Thailand in 1967. Jimmy always enjoyed difficult places and the challenge of succeeding where others had failed. In 1973, he obtained an MEd from the University of Southern California. On leave from his duties in the field from 1976-78, he spent time refining his phonetic knowledge with Prof. David Abercrombie at the University of Edinburgh and with Prof. Eugénie Henderson in London.

Jimmy worked for many agencies throughout his career, including the Ford Foundation, the UN, and the Peace Corps. In every new official capacity in which he served, he worked with speakers of different languages, usually from the remotest of regions. He carried out phonetic research, in the field, on over 300 languages, in East Asia, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, South America, North America, West Africa, and the former Soviet Union. He taught general phonetics in several universities, in Armenia, Brazil, Laos, Nepal, Indonesia, Scotland, and Thailand, over a 25-year period; he produced foreign-language textbooks for English speakers on Armenian, Aymara, Estonian, Hausa, Igbo, Latvian, Lithuanian, Thai, and Yoruba; and he trained college and university teachers of English as a second language in both applied linguistics and TEFL for over 20 years. Many academic phoneticians, particularly in Thailand, owe their training to Jimmy.

Possessing unrelenting good will and compassion, Jimmy was undeterred by danger and was a solid and reliable fighter for minority people’s rights. His sense of duty and of humanitarian service, including the maintenance of minority ethnic groups’ languages, was a constant and active concern. He was a man of unyielding integrity and of rare achievement. In 1980, he was engaged as a principal frontline worker for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Thailand, organizing and protecting Cambodian refugees fleeing the Killing Fields. On the basis of that action, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the Office of the UNHCR in 1981. Jimmy received a personal certificate of the Nobel Peace Prize, which visitors could admire on the wall of his house in Kirkland. He was very proud of that accomplishment, and we in the Department of Linguistics are very proud to have a colleague who won a Nobel Prize, but nothing was more important to Jimmy than teaching, learning, and providing access to education, particularly for the linguistic communities he worked with. He was especially proud that all of his children received advanced educations.

Jimmy never stopped doing phonetic research. In his later years, he revived his passion for experimental methods and his talent for working with people as an adjunct professor with the Department of Linguistics at the University of Victoria. At Washington, Jimmy had been in the same graduate class as Thomas M. Hess, who joined the University of Victoria Linguistics Department in 1968, setting the stage for UVic to be a centre for research and revitalization of First Nations languages, particularly the Salish family of languages. Jimmy began his research collaboration at UVic in 1996, having met John Esling at Edinburgh in 1976. He worked on UVic research projects quite intensively for about 10 years – on the experimental phonetic analysis of several languages from diverse language families, including Nuuchahnulth (Wakashan), Nlaka’pamuxcín (Salish), Tigrinya (Semitic), Palestinian Arabic (Semitic), Iraqi Arabic (Semitic), Somali (Cushitic), Amis (Austronesian), Yi (Tibeto-Burman), Bai (Sino-Tibetan/Tibeto-Burman), Tibetan (Tibeto-Burman), Sui (Kam-Daic), Thai (Daic), Pame (Oto-Manguean), Akan (Niger-Congo, Kwa), and Kabiye (Niger-Congo, Gur). He was instrumental in providing the link between Indigenous communities and pure phonetic laboratory research, bringing many speakers of Indigenous languages into the labs of the Linguistics Department, providing the linguistic phonetic analysis of their sound systems, and encouraging them to become co-authors on papers in cases where the subjects were studying for a degree. Had Jimmy not been possessed of his unique set of personal skills, we could never in the Phonetics Laboratory have been able to contact such a wide range of speakers of so many languages, and we could not have developed the University of Victoria Phonetic Database to the extent we did. Jimmy helped us to use the tools of experimental phonetic analysis (such as fibreoptic laryngoscopy) to visualize the articulatory structures that are responsible for producing the contrasting sounds of speech. He made every visitor’s experience in the lab pleasant, unintimidating, and enjoyable.