James Louis Barker was born on 27 July 1880 in North Ogden, Utah, to Henry and Margaret Stalle Barker. He received his early education in the Weber County School District, and at age 15 moved to Salt Lake City to attend the University of Utah. Upon graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree from the U of U in 1901, Barker left for Switzerland to serve a four-year mission for the LDS Church. After his return in 1904, he began an extensive study of foreign languages with part-time post-graduate work at such notable schools as Universite de Neuchatel, College de France, and the Sorbonne in Paris. In 1906, he married Kate Montgomery, and together they moved to Paris where he enrolled as a full-time doctoral student at the Sorbonne. Upon his return to the United States with two academic diplomas, Barker was hired as principal of Weber Academy and later as chair of BYU's fledgling language department. In 1919, he was appointed head of the University of Utah's Modern Language Department, a position he held for almost three decades. James L. Barker died in 1958.
The James Louis Barker papers (1916-1966) include letters of praise, professional correspondence, research materials, and published articles reflecting the personal and professional life of one of the world's most accomplished phoneticians.
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Collection Name, Collection Number, Box Number, Folder Number. Special Collections, J. Willard Marriott Library, The University of Utah.
Gift of Dr. Oren E. Moffett,1986.
Processed by Janet Smoak and Keith Morgan in 1991.
Photographs were transferred to the Multimedia Division of Special Collections (A0188).
The "Letters of Tribute" bond folder of folder 1 contains personal letters of tribute sent soon after Barker's untimely death in May 1958. Of particular interest is the letter sent to LDS Church President David O. McKay by Dr. Rene' Belle', Chairman of University of Southern California's Department of French. The other two bond folders contain dated and undated "Statements of Recommendation" from 1925 to 1940. Most of the statements were sent to Barker in response to his request for a critical review of a new text entitled, "English Pronunciation-Part 1, Our Language."
The most recent item in this collection, dated 8 September 1966, is a letter to Kate Barker, Barker's wife, from one of his former colleagues. It is included in the "Personal" bond folder. The remaining five bond folders, entitled, "Professional," include letters from the Linguistic Society of America's Administrative Committee, the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service regarding the text they commissioned him to write, and critical letters of review concerning his manual on English pronunciation.
The ten bond folders within these two folders contain Barker's textual rough drafts, handouts and comments from and about fellow phoneticians, proposed texts nearing final stage, and a summary of instructors' reports on "How I Teach Pronunciation."
The "Published Articles" folder covers a broad segment of Barker's professional life. His first article was published in November 1916 while serving as chair of BYU's Language Department. His last, and perhaps most famous, entitled "Dynamic vs. Static Phonetics," was published in June 1940. Although this collection contains only a portion of those articles actually written by Barker, they do sufficiently reflect his research focus and innovative ideas.
During the ten-year period from December 1925 to December 1935, Barker's reputation grew to expansive proportions with his creative approach to the teaching of foreign languages. Statements from newspaper clippings in this bond folder are taken from local newspapers and from newspapers as far away as Columbia University's Teachers College.