Kay Williamson

Kay Williamson (1935 – January 3, 2005, Brazil), born Ruth Margaret Williamson was a linguist who specialised in the study of African languages, particularly those of the Niger Delta in Nigeria, where she lived for nearly fifty years. She has been called "The Mother of Nigerian Linguistics." Her many publications include a grammar and dictionary of the Ijo language, a dictionary of Igbo and numerous articles on diverse topics. She is also notable for proposing the Pan-Nigerian alphabet.
Kay Williamson was known for her "concern for social responsibility in linguistics."
She devoted a substantial part of her time to the Rivers Readers Project, an exercise designed to introduce reading and writing in primary schools in about 20 dialects or languages in the predominantly Ijo-speaking area. As a byproduct, several books (including primers, readers, teachers' notes, spelling manuals, and collection of folk-tales) were compiled by Kay and her collaborators.
It did not bother her that such works do not earn plaudits as academic publications. She was totally convinced that a linguist must help speakers of the languages of her research to produce texts in their languages.
Her unpublished work is being edited by Roger Blench.
She was brought up a Methodist, but became a Quaker in the early 1990s, and subsequently took peace activism very seriously.
Birth.
Professor Kay Williamson was born in Hereford, England, where she lived for the first 18 years of her life. Kay was the eldest of six children. Her father, Alfred Henry Williamson, also known as Harry, was the founder of Wyevale Nurseries. Her father and mother, Harriett Eileen Williamson, turned the Wyevale nurseries into one of the largest garden center chains in Europe. Kay was educated at Hereford girls' high school and St Hilda's College, Oxford, where she took a BA in English in 1956, followed by an MA in 1960.
Death.
In 2002, she was appointed UNESCO Professor of Cultural Heritage, University of Port Harcourt, a position she held until she died at the age of 69 in Brazil on the 3rd of January 2005.