- Noam Chomsky
Avram Noam Chomsky, Ph.D (born December 7, 1928) is an American linguist, philosopher, political activist, and a prolific author and lecturer. He is the Institute Professor Emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Chomsky is credited with the creation of the theory of generative grammar, considered to be one of the most significant contributions to the field of linguistics made in the 20th century. - George Lakoff
George Lakoff is Goldman Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has served for 36 years. Before that, he taught at Harvard and the University of Michigan. His new book is "The Political Mind: Why You Can't Understand 21st Century Politics with an 18th Century Brain." - Steven Pinker
Steven Pinker , a native of Montreal, received his BA from McGill University in 1976 and his PhD in psychology from Harvard in 1979. After teaching at MIT for 21 years, he returned to Harvard in 2003 as the Johnstone Professor of Psychology. Pinker's experimental research on cognition and language won the Troland Award from the National Academy of Sciences and two prizes from the American Psychological Association. - Ferdinand de Saussure
Ferdinand de Saussure (November 26, 1857 – February 22, 1913) was a Geneva-born Swiss linguist whose ideas laid the foundation for many of the significant developments in linguistics in the 20th century. He is widely considered the 'father' of 20th-century linguistics. - George Bernard Shaw
George Bernard Shaw (26 July 1856-2 November 1950) was an Irish dramatist, literary critic, and socialist. During his career Shaw wrote more than sixty plays. He was uniquely honoured by being awarded both a Nobel Prize (1925) for his contribution to literature and an Oscar (1938) for "Pygmalion". He was a strong advocate for socialism and women's rights, a vegetarian and teetotaller, and a harsh critic of formal education. - David Crystal
Professor David Crystal, OBE (born 1941 in Lisburn, Northern Ireland, UK) is a linguist, academic and author. He grew up in Holyhead, North Wales, and Liverpool, England where he attended St Mary's College from 1951. He grew up bilingual in Welsh and English, which influenced his approach to language education. Crystal studied English at University College London between 1959 and 1962. He was a researcher under Randolph Quirk between 1962 and 1963, … - Deborah Tannen
Deborah Frances Tannen (born June 7, 1945) is an American professor of sociolinguistics at Georgetown University. Although she has lectured worldwide in her field, and written or edited numerous academic publications on linguistics and interpersonal communication, she is best known for her general-audience books on interpersonal communication and public discourse. - Edward Sapir
Edward Sapir, (January 26 1884 - February 4 1939) was an American anthropologist-linguist, a leader in American structural linguistics, and one of the creators of what is now called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. He is arguably the most influential figure in American linguistics, influencing several generations of linguists across several schools of linguistics. - Mark Liberman
Mark Liberman is a linguist. He has a dual appointment at the University of Pennsylvania, as Trustee Professor of Phonetics in the Department of Linguistics, and as a professor in the Department of Computer and Information Sciences. He is also currently the director of the Linguistic Data Consortium. He is an alumnus of MIT, having completed his PhD there in 1975. Liberman's main research interests lie in phonetics, prosody, and other aspects of speech communication. - Roman Jakobson
Roman Osipovich Jakobson was a Russian thinker who became one of the most influential linguists of the 20th century by pioneering the development of structural analysis of language, poetry, and art. - John McWhorter
John H. McWhorter (1965-), was associate professor of linguistics at University of California, Berkeley until 2003, and is now a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute think tank and a columnist for the "New York Sun". He is the author of several books on language and race relations. McWhorter attended Friends Select School (a Quaker high school in Philadelphia) and was accepted to Simon's Rock College after tenth grade. - Geoffrey Nunberg
Geoffrey Nunberg is a linguist who teaches at the UC Berkeley School of Information. As a linguist, he is best known for his work on lexical semantics, in particular on the phenomena of polysemy, deferred reference and indexicality. He has also written extensively about the cultural and social implications of new technologies. Nunberg has been commenting on language, usage, and society for National Public Radio's "Fresh Air" program since 1988. - J. R. R. Tolkien
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien CBE (3 January 1892 – 2 September 1973) was an English philologist, writer and university professor, best known as the author of "The Hobbit" and "The Lord of the Rings". He was an Oxford professor of Anglo-Saxon language (Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon) from 1925 to 1945, and Merton Professor of English language and literature from 1945 to 1959. He was a devout Roman Catholic. - Larry Wall
Larry Wall (born September 27, 1954) is a programmer, linguist, and author, most widely known for his creation of the Perl programming language in 1987. Wall earned his bachelor's degree from Seattle Pacific University in 1976. Wall is the author of the rn Usenet client and the nearly universally used patch program. - John McCarthy
John McCarthy (born 1953 in Medford, Massachusetts) is a linguist and professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst with a speciality in phonology and morphology. He was educated at Harvard University and MIT and was responsible, along with Alan Prince, for extending autosegmental phonology, and later Optimality Theory, to morphology. - Heidi Harley
Heidi B. Harley (born September 26, 1969) is an Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Arizona. She is the author or coauthor of three books, and has several papers published on formal syntactic theory, morphology, and lexical semantics. She was born in Oregon, but was raised in St. John's, Newfoundland. She is one of the main researchers working in the theory of Distributed morphology. - William Labov
William Labov is an American linguist, widely regarded as the founder of the discipline of variationist sociolinguistics. He has been described as "an enormously original and influential figure who has created much of the methodology" of sociolinguistics. He is employed as a professor in the linguistics department of the University of Pennsylvania, and pursues research in sociolinguistics, language change, and dialectology. - Bernard Comrie
Bernard Comrie (born May 23, 1947 in Sunderland, UK) is a British-born linguist. He is a professor at and director of the Department of Linguistics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and Distinguished Professor of Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Between 1985 and 1986 he spent 12 months in New Guinea in the field working on the Haruai language. - Arnold Zwicky
Arnold M. Zwicky is a perennial Visiting Professor of linguistics at Stanford University, and Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of linguistics at the Ohio State University. A student of Morris Halle at MIT, he has made notable contributions over the year to fields of phonology (half-rhymes), morphology (realizational morphology, rules of referral), syntax (clitics, construction grammar), interfaces (the Principle of Phonology-Free Syntax), … - William Jones
Sir William Jones (September 28, 1746 - April 27, 1794) was an English philologist and student of ancient India, particularly known for his proposition of the existence of a relationship among Indo-European languages. - Leonard Bloomfield
Leonard Bloomfield was an American linguist, whose influence dominated the development of structural linguistics in America between the 1930s and the 1950s. He is especially known for his book "Language" (1933), describing the state of the art of linguistics at its time. Bloomfield was the main founder of the Linguistic Society of America. Bloomfield's thought was mainly characterized by its behavioristic principles for the study of meaning, … - Ray Jackendoff
Ray Jackendoff (born January 23, 1945) is an influential contemporary linguist who has always straddled the boundary between generative linguistics and cognitive linguistics, committed as he is both to the existence of an innate Universal Grammar (an important thesis of generative linguistics) and to giving an account of language that meshes well with the current understanding of the human mind and cognition (the main purpose of cognitive linguistics). - Suzette Haden Elgin
Suzette Haden Elgin is an American science fiction author. She founded the Science Fiction Poetry Association, and is considered an important figure in the field of science fiction conlangs. Elgin also publishes non-fiction, of which the best-known is the "Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense" series Born in 1936 in Missouri, Elgin attended the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) in the 1960s, and began writing science fiction in order to pay tuition. - Wilhelm von Humboldt
Friedrich Wilhelm Christian Karl Ferdinand Freiherr von Humboldt, government functionary, diplomat, philosopher, founder of Humboldt Universität in Berlin, friend of Goethe and especially of Schiller, is especially remembered as a German linguist who introduced a knowledge of the Basque language to European intellectuals. His younger brother Alexander von Humboldt was an equally famous naturalist and scientist. - John Grinder
John Grinder, Ph.D. (born 1940) is an American author and linguist. Grinder (pronounced grin-der,) is credited (with Richard Bandler) with the creation of the field of Neuro-linguistic programming. - Pompeu Fabra
Pompeu Fabra i Poch was a Catalan grammarian, the main author of the normative reform of contemporary Catalan language. Trained as a mechanical engineer, from a quite young age he dedicated himself to the study of the Catalan language. Through a group called "L'Avenç", he promoted a campaign to reform Catalan orthography (1890-91), publishing in (1904) with Jaume Massó i Torrents and Joaquim Casas i Carbó a "Tractat d'ortografia catalana". - Joseph Greenberg
Joseph Harold Greenberg was a prominent and controversial linguist, known for his work in both language classification and typology. He was born in Brooklyn, New York, USA, and served for many years on the faculty of Stanford University. - Derek Bickerton
Derek Bickerton (born March 25, 1926) is a linguist and Professor Emeritus at the University of Hawaii, Honolulu. Based on his work in creole languages in Guyana and Hawaii, he has proposed that the features of creole languages provide powerful insights into the development of language both by individuals and as a feature of the human species. He is the father of contemporary artist Ashley Bickerton. A graduate of the University of Cambridge, England in 1949, … - Alexander von Humboldt
(September 14, 1769, Berlin – May 6, 1859, Berlin) was a Prussian naturalist and explorer, and the younger brother of the Prussian minister, philosopher, and linguist Wilhelm von Humboldt. Humboldt's quantitative work on botanical geography was foundational to the field of biogeography. Between 1799 and 1804, von Humboldt travelled to Latin America, exploring and describing it from a scientific point of view for the first time. - Otto Jespersen
Jens Otto Harry Jespersen or Otto Jespersen (July 16, 1860-April 30, 1943) was a Danish linguist who specialized in the grammar of the English language. He was born in Randers in northern Jutland and attended Copenhagen University, earning degrees in English, French, and Latin. He also studied linguistics at Oxford. Jespersen was a professor of English at Copenhagen University from 1893 to 1925. - August Schleicher
August Schleicher was a German linguist. His great work was "A Compendium of the Comparative Grammar of the Indo-European Languages", in which he attempted to reconstruct the Proto-Indo-European language. August Schleicher was born in Meiningen (Duchy Saxe-Meiningen, southwest of Weimar in the Thuringian Forest). He began his career studying theology and Indo-European, especially Slavic languages. - Morris Halle
Morris Halle, né Pinkowitz, is an American linguist. He was born in Liepaja, Latvia, in 1923, and moved with his family to Riga in 1929. They arrived in the United States in 1940. From 1941 to 1943, Halle studied engineering at the City College of New York. He entered the United States Army in 1943 and was discharged in 1946, at which point he went to the University of Chicago, where he got his master's degree in linguistics in 1948. - Zellig Harris
Zellig Sabbetai Harris (October 23, 1909 - May 22, 1992) was an American linguist, mathematical syntactician, and methodologist of science. Originally a Semiticist, he is best known for his work in structural linguistics and discourse analysis and for the discovery of transformational structure in language, all achieved in the first 10 years of his career and published within the first 25. His contributions in the subsequent 35 years, including sublanguage grammar, … - Peter Ladefoged
Peter Nielsen Ladefoged was an English-American linguist and phonetician who traveled the world to document the distinct sounds of endangered languages and pioneered ways to collect and study data. He was active at the universities of Edinburgh, Scotland and Ibadan, Nigeria 1953-61. At Edinburgh he studied phonetics with David Abercrombie, who himself had studied with Daniel Jones and was thus connected to Henry Sweet. - Anthony Burgess
Anthony Burgess (February 25, 1917 - November 22, 1993) was a British novelist, critic and composer. He was also active as a librettist, poet, pianist, playwright, screenwriter, journalist, essayist, travel writer, broadcaster, translator, linguist and educationalist. Born in Harpurhey, Manchester in northwest England, he lived and worked variously in Southeast Asia, the United States and Mediterranean Europe. - Gregory Bateson
Gregory Bateson was a British anthropologist, social scientist, linguist, and cyberneticist whose work intersected that of many other fields. Some of his most noted writings are to be found in his books, "Steps to an Ecology of Mind" (1972), "Mind and Nature" (1980), and "Angels Fear: Towards an Epistemology of the Sacred" (1988), the last published posthumously and co-authored with his daughter Mary Catherine Bateson. - Paul Kay
Paul Kay is an emeritus professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, USA. He joined the University in 1966 as a member of the Department of Anthropology, transferring to the Department of Linguistics in 1982. He is best known for his work with anthropologist Brent Berlin on colour: "Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution" (1969) ISBN 1-57586-162-3. - Stephen Krashen
Stephen Krashen, professor emeritus at the University of Southern California, is a highly acclaimed linguist, educational researcher and activist. Krashen is best known for his contributions to the fields of second language acquisition (SLA), bilingual education, and reading. Krashen was born in Chicago in 1941. After spending two years in the Peace Corps in Ethiopia where he taught eighth grade English and science, … - Benjamin Whorf
Benjamin Lee Whorf was an American linguist. He is along with Edward Sapir best known as the author of works that laid the foundation for the so-called Sapir–Whorf hypothesis. - Anthony Aristar
Anthony Manuel Rodrigues Aristar is the founder of the LINGUIST List, the most important linguistic resource on the web. He was born in Cape Town, South Africa in 1948, received his BA from the University of Melbourne in Australia, his AM from the University of Chicago, and his PhD from the University of Texas at Austin. He is now co-director of the Institute for Language and Information Technology at Eastern Michigan University, where he is a professor of linguistics.
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