Career
He is best known for his work on Hixkaryana, known for its object–verb–subject word order. Derbyshire"s study of the language (as a linguist with the Summer Institute of Linguistics) resulted in the first description in the linguistics literature of a language with this word order as its default. The most surprising story Derbyshire told of the long period of work in the Hixkaryana village of remote northern Brazil concerned a day in November 1965, during the visit by then New York"s United States Senator Robert F. Kennedy.
The recounting of that three-day visit included how Senator Kennedy declared his decision to run for President of the United States.
