Ken MacKinnon (26 August 1933 – 21 May 2021) was a British linguist who is known as the father of Scottish Gaelic sociolinguistics.
MacKinnon was born in the Poplar in the East End of London on 26 August 1933 to parents whose families came from the Scottish Isle of Arran and Northern Ireland.
[2] Following his return from Germany, he taught in Essex secondary schools and technical colleges, and was the head of department at the Barking College of Technology and subsequently was senior lecturer and reader at the Hatfield Polytechnic amongst various other appointments.
[1] He subsequently took a master's degree and was made a senior research fellow of the Social Science Research Council and used the opportunity to embark on studying the sociolinguistic situation of the Isle of Harris between 1972 and 1974[2] and was heavily involved in the discipline since then.
[5] Prof MacKinnon published numerous papers and books from the 1970s onwards, most of them on Gaelic in Scotland and Nova Scotia, minority languages and demographics, including:[4]