Katrina Ann Mickey linguist and phonetician: born Los Angeles 17 March 1951 married 1987 Dick

Katrina Ann Mickey, linguist and phonetician: born Los Angeles 17 March 1951; married 1987 Dick Hayward; died London 24 February 2001. Katrina Hayward was a linguist of great versatility and Senior Lecturer in Indonesian and Linguistics at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London.She was born Katrina Mickey in 1951, in Los Angeles. Her scientific approach to the study of language was grounded in a joint degree at Harvard in Linguistics and Mathematics. There she acquired a lasting passion for Greek, and also learnt Russian. In 1972 she came to London, and studied phonetics as an occasional student at University College.

Unusually, though, for one for whom living speech was language's most captivating feature, she continued to study historical linguistics. She followed a Diploma in Comparative Philology at Oxford in 1974 by researching for a DPhil on "Studies in the Greek Dialects and the Language of Greek Verse Inscriptions".Her supervisor, Professor Anna Morpurgo Davies was worried that shyness at interview might handicap her When she applied for a lectureship at Soas, Professor R.H. Robins was happy to report that she had been "a wonderful interviewee". This became the pattern of her life: fellow specialists instantly recognised her quality, while those who were ignorant of her work did not realise how truly distinguished she was.As a condition of her appointment at Soas, she was asked to concentrate on phonetics This became her main research field. She was given responsibility for the Phonetics Laboratory, and by the late 1980s was publishing articles on the phonetics of languages as diverse as Shona, Swahili, Arabic and Korean. The culmination of this work was Experimental Phonetics (2000), which had been commissioned by Robins for the Longman Linguistics Library. It confirmed, by the wide range of her expertise in experimental techniques, Katrina Hayward's standing as one of Britain's leading phoneticians.In 1980-81 she had started learning Indonesian and Javanese.

She increasingly focused her research on phonatory phenomena in Javanese, and began to teach Indonesian. She became a half-member of the Department of South East Asia at Soas in 1992, and a full member in 1998. Students who took her excellent Indonesian for granted were probably unaware how long her journey to it had been from her philological base.Her successive interests all, however, stayed with her, and for the next phase of her research she planned an "interdisciplinary approach to Javanese and Indonesian philology and morphology" that would combine a synchronic with a diachronic approach.Hayward also planned work on voice quality in non-Western singing traditions, working with colleagues in the Music Department, with whom she had earlier collaborated in the study of rhythm. Music was her chief leisure interest, and in the beautiful house in Caernarvon that she and her husband, Professor Dick Hayward, a phonologist and a member of the Africa Department at Soas, made their principal home, a Broadwood grand and a fortepiano had pride of place.Katrina Hayward's gentle, mellifluous speaking voice gave almost no hint of her American origins This was by choice. When she started teaching phonetics, she decided it would confuse her students if she spoke with an American accent So almost overnight she shed it. Colleagues, fellow phoneticians and students will remember and esteem her for such characteristic self-effacement..