Estate Gift Creates Lasting Memory

To donors John and Serena Gregg of Langley BC, supporting students at the Canada Institute of Linguistics was a way to honour the memory of John’s father, a distinguished linguist. When John’s father died in 1998, John and Serena decided that their own family was adequately provided for, and that this was their opportunity to be involved in the Great Commission ministering to people in some of the most remote regions on earth.

“We decided to remember my father’s amazing gift for languages by making funds available from his estate to assist the Canada Institute of Linguistics (CanIL) in building training facilities where new linguists who shared his passion for languages could continue to be trained,” said Mr. Gregg.

Dr. Robert John Gregg earned a Bachelor of Arts at Queen’s University in Belfast, Northern Ireland and a PhD from Edinburgh University. He emigrated to Canada in 1954. After teaching in the French Department at the University of British Columbia, he was made head of the newly established Linguistics Department and set up a language laboratory, the first one in a Canadian university.

A distinguished scholar who had a working knowledge of fourteen languages, Dr. Gregg was internationally recognized as a dialectologist. Due to his intervention in the 60's the Mount Currie and Sechelt Coast Salish language did not disappear when the elders died. It now lives as a written language, the goal of literacy and translation work performed by CanIL graduates. Professor Gregg will also be remembered for co-authoring the Gage school dictionaries of Canadian English.

CanIL began in 1985 as a summer program with only 10 students. Now CanIL is the official linguistics department of Trinity Western University, enrolling 300 students annually in year-round classes toward a Bachelor of Arts degree, a Master’s degree in Linguistics and Exegesis, and a certificate in TESL.

Affiliated with Wycliffe Bible Translators, trainees are assigned around the world in literacy-based development and translation projects. They serve the half billion people who have inadequate or no access to the Bible in a language they understand. John Gregg quips, “That isn’t the end of it, as I’ve made arrangements for my own estate to benefit the work of CanIL as well.”

For more information contact:

Judy Friesen,
Vice President Development
7600 Glover Road, Langley B.C.
(604) 513-2129

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