Albert Gatschet

Albert Louis Samuel Gatschet (/ˈɡætʃɪt/ GATCH-it or /ɡəˈʃeɪ/ gə-SHAY; October 3, 1832 – March 16, 1907) was a Swiss-American linguist, philologist, and ethnologist. He is best known for his contributions to the study of the Indigenous peoples and languages of North America. His work included analyses of almost a hundred different languages and preserved many on the brink of extinction.

Born in Switzerland to a Protestant minister, Gatschet studied at universities in Switzerland and Germany before immigrating to the United States in 1868, where he worked as a language teacher. In 1872, the German botanist Oscar Loew asked him to analyze sixteen American Indian vocabularies recorded during the Wheeler Survey. His analysis was presented to the United States Congress and culminated in a German-language book which earned him the attention of Major John Wesley Powell, who hired Gatschet as an ethnologist for the Smithsonian Institution. Gatschet was later a founding member of the Bureau of American Ethnology and spent the majority of his life traveling the United States and completing surveys of the nation's languages en masse.

Gatschet's work remains highly regarded; his ethnological and linguistic publications on Indigenous peoples and their languages are considered to have pioneered the field. His reorganization of the language families of Indigenous languages earned him significant appreciation during his lifetime. His work on the Klamath people earned him particular praise, including from the people themselves several decades after his death. The American linguist Ives Goddard described Gatschet's work as part of the driving force behind a period of transition away from missionary-based linguistic study and towards a view based on scientific interest.