Across the Frontiers of Language: The Linguistic Legacy of Li Fang-Kuei

Across the Frontiers of Language traces Li Fang-Kuei’s remarkable journey from his pioneering fieldwork among Athabaskan communities in California and Canada to his foundational studies of Tai‑Kadai and Sino‑Tibetan in China. Li’s career crossed borders of geography, method, and culture. Drawing on archival materials, correspondence, institutional histories, and the testimonies of students and colleagues, this book reveals a life lived at the crossroads of Chinese scholarship and American structural linguistics. It follows Li from Beijing to Chicago, from Berkeley to Hawai‘i, and into remote field sites where he documented languages on the brink of disappearance.More than a biography, this is a study of how knowledge travels—how ideas, methods, and scholarly communities move across nations and disciplines. Li’s story illuminates the making of modern linguistics in a century marked by war, migration, and global intellectual exchange. When someone once asked him why he devoted his whole life to the study historical linguistics, his reply was “Language is one of the greatest manifestations of the human spirit, there is no study more rewarding.”For readers of linguistic history, Asian studies, and transnational biography, this book offers a vivid portrait of a quiet revolutionary whose scholarship continues to shape the field today. Read more